Guild Wars 2

Palador.2170:

I have no problems with skill getting you something faster, as long as everyone can get it eventually. But when it becomes a barrier to content and rewards, isn’t that a problem?

I have a problem with everyone being able to get everything eventually. I like skill gates because I consider them fair. It wouldn’t be a barrier to content because you still get to attempt the content you’re just not assured to successfully complete it (i.e Risk something sorely missing from this game).
I can give lots of examples, but I’ll say that it’s a staple element of games, those who are better at them get cooler items, more verity etc.
A guildwars 1 example, you had to complete a full run of the Fissure of Woe, an elite challenging area with advanced mobs and hard combat where if you wiped you lost all progress. This could take up to 3 hours for a group to do successfully and was the only way to get the elite armor Obsidian armor.
It was fair, as any player at max level could attempt it, there was a way to access it from each campaign. So all it came down to was were you good enough.

As an analogy the skin is a trophy, you can enter the Martial arts competition for a chance to win the 2014 martial arts trophy. You have a fair chance to try and get it but there’s a risk you won’t , if you don’t get it you can’t get it by other means as there is only one way to earn the 2014 martial arts trophy and that is by winning the 2014 martial arts tournament.

For it to be worth the players while it has to be unique, no alternate way to get it. getting something slightly faster is not a reward in an MMO.

The Lost Witch.7601:

Hmm, but players conquering challenges on their own in an MMORPG to get the most rewarding stuff wouldn’t be very community building. Which might be fine, but could work against the community spirit that arenanet seems to have in mind.

I remember reading somewhere that most people think that they’re part of the most clever 50% of the population. While statistically this cannot be true. And I believe this to be wonderful. For to feel good about ourself, that is a great thought to have. I would hate it if everyone was tested for cleverness and usefulness only for people to find out where they stand exactly. While in ignorance we could lead a much happier life.

I remember Anets description of the Mad King’s Clocktower puzzle was that they expected only 10% of the player-base to be able to complete it. Similar statistical descriptions were given for Legendaries, Liandri and SAB I believe.
I would hope people playing video games would not be so delusional to believe they are the best, if they can handle it in every other game I don’t see why not here.

A more developed discussion on group challenges could be brought up, to develop means where every player has to play a part to prevent run buying. Allowing for group challenges to be just that.

The Lost Witch.7601:

And by the time the new players have learned… will the veterans be even further ahead looking for new challenges? And after a while… will the veterans remember the long way it took to get there? And how will that seem to the new players? And will they continue to do the same content together?

I have always found that to be part of the fun of an MMO, you join years later and you can then cherry pick which challenges to do first, then what to expand upon.
As the progression is Horizontal not vertical there’s nothing stopping a new player who wants to try for the hat of doom and the gloves of fluffy bunnies doing the two challenges for them first even if one was added in 2014 and the other in 2016.

Nike.2631:

Well, I stand by my initial thoughts in The New Masters, as a workable example with NPCs that act as a mini quest-hub for all characters but with added benefits for character’s of the corresponding class.

New Mastery allows you to develop and expand the skills and roles available to your class by unlocking access to new weapons, a new line of utility skills and an elite, and by unlocking Mastery-specific skins and titles to show your mastery of this new subset of skills.

There is one sentence distilling the best ideas I’ve seen for subclasses (or Mastery). It creates progression along all three axis: Rewards, Gameplay Variety, and New Content.

It leads to distinct rewards — new skins and/or titles to show you have mastered that line/subclass, new skills to use, and opens access to a new weapon or previously unusable weapon.

It leads to Gameplay Variety by adding a new line of weapon skills tied to the new weapon, by adding new utilities/elites, and therefore expanding the playground for new builds without cornering anyone off from their old skills. It also avoids the trap of overcomplicating the Trait tree, or creating power creep by upping the trait max to 40. The fresh new Gameplay Variety will apply to all existing content as people can use their new builds/weapons/skills in all content – refreshing the game for everyone.

New Content is created as the player goes along the path to Mastery (I suggest using the Personal Story to guide people, but a trainer/mentor would also work). The New Content can be a mix of open world and/or instanced areas, allowing Anet to recycle or repurpose some old content and also introduce some new things. I think the coolest way to culminate this would be with a story mode dungeon related to Mastery, and then open that dungeon to explorable mode with increased difficulty and different paths so that players can master new content.

Design Options
If you rename the idea of subclasses as “Masteries” then you could potentially add them piecemeal, and indefinitely. You could release one new mastery for all classes to start with, and then keep adding new masteries as time goes on. That would keep expanding the variety of builds and gameplay options without changing core mechanics, or creating an overload on Anet resources as they expand the options available to the classes. This also gives a definite beginning and endpoint to all characters for this skill – “Oh, my Warrior can now master Chi which will unlock his ability to wield a staff, and then as I progress the Mastery storyline/tasks he will also unlock new skills and utilities? Cool!” And then you have achieved full Mastery once you unlock the Elite. Or you could gate more Mastery-related skins or titles even beyond that, encouraging players to utilize their newfound skills by conquering further tasks in the world or accumulating materials/currencies for the skins.

Mastery Dungeons
As part of the Mastery upgrade, all dungeons should be given a Mastery option beyond Explorable Mode. It wouldn’t take much scaling up to make these dungeons challenging and fresh again, and encourage people to revisit content which has become a bit too Faceroll (especially since Ascended was introduced). While you are scaling up, new mechanics could be added to expand viability of builds by adding monster autoattacks to reduce the dominance of Berserker gear and make Confusion viable, retooling condition stacking on bosses to make condition builds more viable, etc.

The Lost Witch.7601:

Well, even if results can’t be sold it can still have an impact on the economy. If the obtained rewards are replacements of rewards that you would otherwise get with money.

Let’s say a weapon, or even a skin. If you were to get that through skill – related rewards, you wouldn’t need to buy the weapon or skin with money. The net result being: you saved yourself money -> influence on the economy even if the reward cannot be traded.

I can see your point.

On the other hand, unless said result translates to several dozen gold I wouldn’t consider it an impact on the economy.

Conski Deshan.2057:

Palador.2170:

I have no problems with skill getting you something faster, as long as everyone can get it eventually. But when it becomes a barrier to content and rewards, isn’t that a problem?

I have a problem with everyone being able to get everything eventually. I like skill gates because I consider them fair. It wouldn’t be a barrier to content because you still get to attempt the content you’re just not assured to successfully complete it (i.e Risk something sorely missing from this game).
I can give lots of examples, but I’ll say that it’s a staple element of games, those who are better at them get cooler items, more verity etc.
A guildwars 1 example, you had to complete a full run of the Fissure of Woe, an elite challenging area with advanced mobs and hard combat where if you wiped you lost all progress. This could take up to 3 hours for a group to do successfully and was the only way to get the elite armor Obsidian armor.
It was fair, as any player at max level could attempt it, there was a way to access it from each campaign. So all it came down to was were you good enough.

No, it came down to “is your team good enough” or alternatively “I paid someone 5 plat to run me through Fissure of Woe with his group so I could use the materials I paid 100 plat to accumulate for my armor”.

. . . and it didn’t even look good on most professions!

By the way, that does affect things by adding a subeconomy to the game: those rewarded for their skill by getting rich as balls off runs.

As an analogy the skin is a trophy, you can enter the Martial arts competition for a chance to win the 2014 martial arts trophy. You have a fair chance to try and get it but there’s a risk you won’t , if you don’t get it you can’t get it by other means as there is only one way to earn the 2014 martial arts trophy and that is by winning the 2014 martial arts tournament.

Yes, but there’s elements of luck in play which simply cause things to go highly awry of “just skill”. You need to be cognizant and plan . . . if your idea of a skill-based challenge to include requires them to never have more than 100ms latency or they wind up missing their jump window, then there are a lot of players who could otherwise do it who wind up locked out not through fault of their own, but misfortune.

This is a terrible result, by the way, and turns it from “skill gating” into “hardware gating”.

For it to be worth the players while it has to be unique, no alternate way to get it. getting something slightly faster is not a reward in an MMO.

I disagree. For it to be worth it to a player, it has to have meaning. Now, what that meaning is could be “I am the only one who was l33t enough”, or “I was dedicated enough to be online at 3am on a Monday morning when the event happened” or “I spent 100 gold for this blue dorito”.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

No, it came down to “is your team good enough” or alternatively “I paid someone 5 plat to run me through Fissure of Woe with his group so I could use the materials I paid 100 plat to accumulate for my armor”.

. . . and it didn’t even look good on most professions!

By the way, that does affect things by adding a subeconomy to the game: those rewarded for their skill by getting rich as balls off runs.

Yes, but there’s elements of luck in play which simply cause things to go highly awry of “just skill”. You need to be cognizant and plan . . . if your idea of a skill-based challenge to include requires them to never have more than 100ms latency or they wind up missing their jump window, then there are a lot of players who could otherwise do it who wind up locked out not through fault of their own, but misfortune.

This is a terrible result, by the way, and turns it from “skill gating” into “hardware gating”.

For it to be worth the players while it has to be unique, no alternate way to get it. getting something slightly faster is not a reward in an MMO.

I disagree. For it to be worth it to a player, it has to have meaning. Now, what that meaning is could be “I am the only one who was l33t enough”, or “I was dedicated enough to be online at 3am on a Monday morning when the event happened” or “I spent 100 gold for this blue dorito”.

I recognize run buying as a major problem for skill content that we will have to address but feel we shouldn’t rule it out just for that. (I quite liked my Ele’s obsidian armor )

Hardware issues and connection issues are also a problem but really we can’t just not develop challenging content because the person running the game on a 10 year old laptop might have difficulty. It is a genuine problem, I’ve played on American servers for games before and been killed and failed challenge content due to the latency it’s annoying but I wouldn’t advocate the removal of it just because I can’t do it.

Sorry I’ll rephrase my last bit , Ideally for me it being a unique item would be my favorite option, you look at a person and go they completed x , y , z I know this because they are wearing the hat, title and have the mini out for those achievements. I know they did’nt buy it because the items are account bound and there is only one challenge where they are obtainable.

@DarkWasp
You have converted me to instanced housing! Great ideas.

With regards to subclasses Chris wants us to output a proposal. From what I have seen we probably should do two presentations. Have Orphal and the group that wants subclasses powwow either through PMs or on the forum to craft their proposal or heck I could make some google docs.
Have Nike and those who don’t want subclasses craft their own alternative for profession HP. I recommend reading this article from gamasutra if you guys want this I can set it up and give you three days to hash out two designs before we post them here.

Conski Deshan.2057:

I recognize run buying as a major problem for skill content that we will have to address but feel we shouldn’t rule it out just for that. (I quite liked my Ele’s obsidian armor )

And ranger Obby didn’t look that bad, but I liked my Monument coat better. WAY better. Especially with blue+silver+silver dye. But I just want you to know, a lot of them were just . . . “what?” . . . like other “Elite Armors”, very hit and miss. And like a lot of things which were eyesores to me, a status symbol which everyone wanted and was willing to shell out platinum for.

But “run buying” shouldn’t disqualify skill content, it’s just what you described was NOT purely skill content. It was a lot of grinding for material collection (or grinding for money to buy the materials, take your pick of grind) ending in an “elite dungeon” you had to buy into with each attempt (including failures), and it was in theory possible to craft a Hero grouping which could roll the content anyway.

It was, in essence, the precursor to dungeon runs from EOTN.

Note, I don’t mind these exist. As a player whose skill (lack thereof) is on my mind during discussions like these, I prefer the option to find people who could carry me through either out of pity, altruism, or greed. But they cheapen the accomplishment/trophy in the eyes of the “hardcore elite” to where it might as well not be skill based anymore.

Hardware issues and connection issues are also a problem but really we can’t just not develop challenging content because the person running the game on a 10 year old laptop might have difficulty. It is a genuine problem, I’ve played on American servers for games before and been killed and failed challenge content due to the latency it’s annoying but I wouldn’t advocate the removal of it just because I can’t do it.

Oh, I would advocate keeping it in mind. Part of the charm of this game and the old Guild Wars 1 was how low the system requirements could be to play it. It’d be like allowing achievements for people only running Mac clients . . . or supported another game or never ever attainable, ever but still can be seen on the checklist of things to earn . . .

By the way, the last could be considered a “skill based” challenge which would be awesome if it wasn’t rendered impossible by new players, and somewhat problematic via random drop chance.

I’d like to see, if we got “skill based challenges” . . . multiple legitimate avenues to earn something which could be considered “significant”. Defeat a solo instance, or a jumping puzzle, or complete a DE chain, or explore to find things related to the challenge. Different skills, same reward. Or maybe the reward gets some indication of which method you used to obtain it, so people know you earned the “Hammer of the Great Dwarf” by the ‘hard’ way or the ‘easy’ way.

Sorry I’ll rephrase my last bit , Ideally for me it being a unique item would be my favorite option, you look at a person and go they completed x , y , z I know this because they are wearing the hat, title and have the mini out for those achievements. I know they didn’t buy it because the items are account bound and there is only one challenge where they are obtainable.

See my last bit above.

Shongaqu.5279:

@DarkWasp
You have converted me to instanced housing! Great ideas.

I largely advocate instanced housing because I played Ultima Online, where real estate was often held both by people who had the opportunity to seize a plot of land big enough for their castles AND the power to keep it unmolested. There were serious land shortages in that game for later players and as awesome as it was to see some player-housing cities in the wild . . . there were many problems related to the whole “public housing”.

Also having played “Ultima Online” I have a really high bar for the ability to decorate your own house. Oops. Looting unusual pieces from treasure maps or dangerous locations, or maybe just thieving them from shops when nobody could see you.

That said, I had a post worked up about housing and what I’d send up to be looked at for discussion on it. I’ll save it if we’re way past that topic now though

ColinJohanson.2394:

A lot of the ideas boiled down into variations of one of these two options, and really both have a lot of cool concepts and ideas. Can folks think of anything else that’s a bit more outside the box for something bigger?

I had suggested several times about Global Dominance system. Similar to WvW…we as players and as a server, complete events across the entire map of Tyria and receive passive bonuses based on the % of the map that we control as players. So if we leave entire zones(say the lesser traveled zones) to be completely occupied by centaurs, for example, we won’t be receiving maximum benefits. And you can use most of the existing dynamic events to accomplish this. There are many DEs that take over way points and camps that we as players can complete and push enemy NPCs back…thus acquiring a larger portion of the world.

This encourages players to play in more than one zone, get sthem out in the world, etc.

On top of this, put in a reward system for completing unique(different) dynamic events in a month. I.E. Complete 90 unique dynamic events in January and receive a Cesmode mini(just kidding). But you get the picture.

Is that big enough and outside the box?

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Shongaqu.5279:

@DarkWasp
You have converted me to instanced housing! Great ideas.

I largely advocate instanced housing because I played Ultima Online, where real estate was often held both by people who had the opportunity to seize a plot of land big enough for their castles AND the power to keep it unmolested. There were serious land shortages in that game for later players and as awesome as it was to see some player-housing cities in the wild . . . there were many problems related to the whole “public housing”.

Also having played “Ultima Online” I have a really high bar for the ability to decorate your own house. Oops. Looting unusual pieces from treasure maps or dangerous locations, or maybe just thieving them from shops when nobody could see you.

That said, I had a post worked up about housing and what I’d send up to be looked at for discussion on it. I’ll save it if we’re way past that topic now though

We can bring the discussion back to housing now , I beleive the idea of the CDI is that once players have ideas they want to discuss they back and forth it between them in the cdi to pick holes or fill gaps.

I’d compromise on the skill challenges, allowing multiple avenues but they all have to be skill based and of roughly equal difficulty (or player % if you prefare).

Anyway housing,
I think realistically whatever ends up happening it has to be instanced, open world is great and all but it would only work for competitive based games , here players would complain about the best spots being taken etc.

So with that as a beginning lets get some questions going,

1. Communities or Solo instances?, do you want to see groups of players houses in the one instance or a private instance with only your house in it? (people can still visit either way.)

2. Construction, what level of involvement would you like? building it block by block? A room by room function where you can pick and choose rooms to add? A series of set designs?

3.Functionalities, I think we can all agree at a basic level housing should allow for some storage and display of trophies/achievements/weapons/armor , in addition to this what would you like to see, Farming? nodes? intractable objects? side missions?

4. Interior customization, placing objects within the house how would you like it to work?

5. Getting items, How do you get items to put in your house?

6. Linking to other content, is there anything you would like to link with housing? (i.e in a perfect vision of the future I could walk out of my house onto an airship dock and take my airship into combat)

Answering myself,
1. Solo as I feel we can build larger houses if we don’t have to share the instance, but if we can still build nice large houses I would be willing to go for community.
2.Room by room, you can customize the size and shape of the room but you don’t have to build it up minecraft style.
3.All of the above + music box + servants/ bartender + dueling ring + firing range )
4. free placement you select the object , depending on what it is you can place it anywhere on the walls or floorspace and rotate it to your liking.
5. A verity of ways , none of which involve gold or the gemstore (not out of dislike for either it’s just this is progression and both of those destroy player progression). Karma for some basic items/ vendors at the end of dungeons could offer some themed items. Specific achievements to unlock others, Living story unlocks, completing collections of stuff could unlock items, craft-able recipe items.
6. Realistically, all I can think of that’s actually possible would be some interaction between Guildhalls and the houses, transport/ delivery’s?

EDIT: Colin posted as I was typing
If you’re willing to ignore the complaints on that system, you could use the title track system, with each level giving you a skill unlock?
alternatively link in housing, you build the research lab and firing range and gain a new ranged magical offensive utility?

Conski Deshan.2057:

We can bring the discussion back to housing now , I beleive the idea of the CDI is that once players have ideas they want to discuss they back and forth it between them in the cdi to pick holes or fill gaps.

Linking to my post here where I laid out most of the broad strokes of my own vision of what MIGHT work within Guild Wars 2 to bring it out.

Reaching to other games for inspiration, though:
Personally, not even Minecraft lets me do it “right” due to the restrictive nature of its design. I prefer Terraria’s decoration breadth . . . especially the recently added trophies which are highly RNG related but still something I’d like to see possible if we do player housing in GW2.

I’d compromise on the skill challenges, allowing multiple avenues but they all have to be skill based and of roughly equal difficulty (or player % if you prefare).

I prefer not “roughly equal difficulty” so much as “proving someone was willing to put effort into attaining it”, no matter what that effort actually is. And not simply “I had gold, and thus I got it” or “I had time, thus I got it”. Though that last one, well, if someone does have the time to just try over and over until they get it through sheer luck instead of skill . . . who could tell?

Anyway housing,

I’ll get back to you on that. New topic from Colin to reply to first.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Some of the ideas I’ve really enjoyed so far from this thread include ->

• Additional story lines with your orders that allow you complete or unlock new masteries/abilities.

• Adding new content to the existing maps (or re-using existing moments) that serves the purpose of being a bit like skill challenges, content on demand that allows you to overcome challenges to allow you unlock various abilities/masteries.

A lot of the ideas boiled down into variations of one of these two options, and really both have a lot of cool concepts and ideas. Can folks think of anything else that’s a bit more outside the box for something bigger?

What about evolving existing abilities or unlocking through use? Say, for example, you use a greatsword on your guardian. As you use it you gain some sorta ‘greatsword xp’ – less for minor content, more for really tough encounters. As your greatsword xp increases, you unlock alternate skills to slot 1-5 on the weapon?

Come to think of it, it might be a way to kinda create ‘sub classes’ without subclasses, if you see what I mean. Use that flamethrower, become a more specialized flamethrower engineer – but not be locked out of switching focus to pistols or turrets and becoming better (more versatile) at those as well.

ColinJohanson.2394:

• Adding new content to the existing maps (or re-using existing moments) that serves the purpose of being a bit like skill challenges, content on demand that allows you to overcome challenges to allow you unlock various abilities/masteries.

A bit like skill challenges, but while skill challenges are just “boss” fights, it would be cool if this kind of content generated entire chains of events with some more gameplay diversity and an interesting scenario behind them.

A lot of the ideas boiled down into variations of one of these two options, and really both have a lot of cool concepts and ideas. Can folks think of anything else that’s a bit more outside the box for something bigger?

Remember GW1’s Hall of Monuments, where the winning team got a game-wide chat message announcing their victory? Using that as an inspiration, but thinking of something completely different (without involving pvp), what about some content being unlocked at the end of epic dynamic events, and rewarding access to unique content?

But hey, this already happens with some mini-dungeons, don’t they? Maybe this concept could be expanded upon.

CONCEPT FOR OPEN-WORLD MINI-SCENARIOS

The teams that would complete specific and long challenging dynamic event chains would unlock access to unique mini-dungeons, with some interesting stories, scenarios and challenges behind them, all leading to a mini-story conclusion and a flavored reward to those players. The reward could be anything, including a new subclass tier, or mastery, or something.

Unlocking an open-world mini-dungeon would be map-wide, a message would automatically be generated in the chat warning players about it, and everyone could join and get the “normal reward”, but only the teams that have participated in the specific events that lead to them (and have met a specific condition) would be allowed to get the unique “mastery” reward, and a ray of light would shine upon them for all other players to see. Another message would automatically be generated in the map, this time announcing the players who have advanced through a mastery, and all other players in the map would be like “wow, how did you get your name in the chat? What did you do to get that mastery? I want to get it too!”

The dynamic events leading to those unique open-world scenarios (let’s call it that) would work as discussed: they would either start automatically from time to time, or start on demand if the player has met a specific condition. However, even though they could be started on demand, they wouldn’t be easy, with a high chance of failure for the unprepared, making them more special.

And finally, for a player to meet the specific condition to start those events on demand (and thus to get the “unique” reward from the end of the mini-scenario later unlocked) could be received from the also-discussed Orders quest system, or something.

There you have it, I proposed a new idea (mini-dungeons/ scenarios unlocked from events) and fused this concept with the two other ideas the community has been discussing (unique on-demand events and orders quests).

ColinJohanson.2394:

The event idea is an interesting one, but it doesn’t feel like a “grand journey” so to speak. Do you feel like if we asked you to do 90 different events in a month, and that allowed your ranger to say become a Druid, you’d feel like that was a cool system?

I would feel that would be just a grind. Quantity over quality is the best solution. I’d like it to be something like the hatching of the Black moa chick from GW1, which felt like a real adventure/scavenger hunt.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Say for example, we decided to allow your profession to gain an additional mastery as Nike and Chuggs in particular discussed above. I think we have a lot of fun ideas in here for the journey unlock specific aspects of that mastery, but what if you first had to unlock the core “mastery” track, which then allowed you collect the smaller components? What kind of experience do you think would be compelling here as an over-all journey?

Forgive me, ladies, gentlemen, and developers. But I am going to say: That doesn’t feel like Guild Wars to me. It feels more like a tabletop RPG such as Ars Magica. Not a bad thing, but the question needs to be raised whether it evokes Guild Wars (either incarnation) enough to fit?

• Additional story lines with your orders that allow you complete or unlock new masteries/abilities.

Yes, please. Let’s have those orders mean something. Let Order of Whispers not just be chosen for Tybalt but because their masteries you can learn are more in tune with their group philosophy. Remember “reputation track skills” from EOTN, where the skills definitely evoked each so-called-faction and didn’t exactly overlap?

Ideally, my point suggesting Vigil be for people who have a direct approach to their game, Priory for knowing the enemy, and Whispers for indirect work. But make these masteries synergize with all the classes rather than “Oh Whispers are for stealth thieves” . . . which is a tall order for design and balance.

But it would be oh so satisfying for your affiliation to reflect on your character. It might lead to . . . roleplaying.

• Adding new content to the existing maps (or re-using existing moments) that serves the purpose of being a bit like skill challenges, content on demand that allows you to overcome challenges to allow you unlock various abilities/masteries.

Probably the quickest way to integrate, probably the one most likely to get players to get into actually playing around with them than the other method, but also most likely to become “normal” and “assumed to have”. Like assuming by now everyone knows the world because it’s been a year.

Again, pros and cons of this method. It depends on whether the players want their new toys quickly or not.

A lot of the ideas boiled down into variations of one of these two options, and really both have a lot of cool concepts and ideas. Can folks think of anything else that’s a bit more outside the box for something bigger?

Sure. Start weaving it into the Living Story where players can interact with the involved NPCs and collect the data of responses. Let them know their choices will shape things . . . then after the chapter closes, take what their responses were to it and build new skills/masteries based on the story having been told via players.

Like, the Antitoxin Spray was a good start but how about this: You have a Living Story event where, oh, destroyers emerge from Mount Maelstrom and a couple other known nests across Tyria. Priory, Order, and Vigil NPCs are around to direct efforts and start DEs, and afterwards each player gets dialogue options which only appear once for each character and are collected.

For instance, and to be simple about it for the example: the choices leaning on protecting people fighting from the destroyers’ abilities, or trying to figure out a better method of fighting them. The information gets collected and in a later bit there’s the NPCs found in Lion’s Arch at the respective order locations saying they have developed new techniques. If the player has an achievement showing they took part in the “voting”, they can pick up the skill/mastery then. If not, they are prompted to go to one of the existing destroyer nests and complete a DE involving destroyers . . . after which they are given the option to pick up the skill/mastery.

1)Both in PvE and WvW more events that use destructible environments where we can use the tanks that the charr invented and the asura perfected.
2)Team PVP that need to use airships to defeat the opposing team.Like a real sky-pirate.
3)Implement the arena in Lion’s Arch from the second book in-game.
4)Make the zaishen do something with the world not just sit in Lion’s Arch boasting about fights.
5)More dungeons in the world(both normal and fractals)
6)Host more contests like for example: art contests where the winner gets to have his armour design put in-game
7)A lot of small events that make you explore more than one map that end with a world-boss battle (doesn’t have to be an existing one)
8)Home instance/housing :

In the home instance: -more resources to gather/mine/cut
-the NPCs that we’ve encountered in the personal story to actually say something; preferably related to the current living story
-after finishing a living story content, the home instance should reflect this in a small meaningful way ranging from NPC’s, small decorations, dialogue with existing NPCs
-home instance specific mini-games that varies depending on which capital you have accessed the home instance; an existing example of this is Belcher’s Bluff if accessed from Hoelbrak; more of that;
-let the pets roam free in the instance, if a player is a hunter or just has collected minis he should be greeted by the when entering his home;

9)Mini-games and jumping puzzles that require you to use a parachute and/or rappel

Traveller.7496:

ColinJohanson.2394:

The event idea is an interesting one, but it doesn’t feel like a “grand journey” so to speak. Do you feel like if we asked you to do 90 different events in a month, and that allowed your ranger to say become a Druid, you’d feel like that was a cool system?

I would feel that would be just a grind. Quantity over quality is the best solution. I’d like it to be something like the hatching of the Black moa chick from GW1, which felt like a real adventure/scavenger hunt.

What if there were a list of Dynamic Events which qualified for changing the Ranger to a Druid, say, but each one was giving a different “weight” to it. Like the Rotting Oakheart event in Queensdale giving +10 while one defeating Sons of Svanir in entirely unrelated means a +1. (That is, still getting it done, but really slowly and not requiring you to jump through hoops.) You fill up the bar to transfer yourself from Ranger to Druid and you can do it . . . AND to make sure you don’t wind up being trapped if you don’t like it, Ranger Trainers will “refresh your memory” and let you go back to being a basic Ranger but also allow you to change to a Druid for a fee of Skill Points (NOT GOLD).

ColinJohanson.2394:

The event idea is an interesting one, but it doesn’t feel like a “grand journey” so to speak. Do you feel like if we asked you to do 90 different events in a month, and that allowed your ranger to say become a Druid, you’d feel like that was a cool system?

By grand journey do you mean in difficulty or length?, As I assume you want all players to be able to unlock their “subclass” fairly soon after hitting 80?

Also could we get a weigh in on your opinion on housing?

Conski Deshan.2057:

ColinJohanson.2394:

The event idea is an interesting one, but it doesn’t feel like a “grand journey” so to speak. Do you feel like if we asked you to do 90 different events in a month, and that allowed your ranger to say become a Druid, you’d feel like that was a cool system?

By grand journey do you mean in difficulty or length?, As I assume you want all players to be able to unlock their “subclass” fairly soon after hitting 80?

Also could we get a weigh in on your opinion on housing?

I’ll offer a counter-view here. First off, what would you consider “fairly soon,” Conski?

• IMO, why should a person unlock their subclass fairly soon after hitting 80? Hitting 80 a person has just reached their last trait points, their max level gear, and all the other elements to cement their play.

• Me personally, I’d be ok with a week-long journey (hardcores could probably rush it out within a few days) that focused more on “unlocking/discovering potential” within your character.

• The idea above that adds different weight to all the events sounds decent, but also sounds incredibly time-consuming to Arenanet. Colin, I probably could do 90 events in a week, but I wouldn’t enjoy it. Instead of deciding on a number first, I’d focus on the flavor of each event being run. I would expect a Ranger hoping to “Ascend” (hehehe) to Druid would do an event track or whatever that sent said Ranger all over Tyria doing Druidy or Rangerish things (those are words ).

• This could conclude with a new instance/dungeon or something where a party completes the final task to “unlock their potential” together. This adds additional merit that GW 2 is a game that’s built on large encounters, profession combos, and player interaction. After said final task is completed, each party member would unlock their prospective track, and they can all rejoice together at their accomplishment.

Conski Deshan.2057:

1. Communities or Solo instances?, do you want to see groups of players houses in the one instance or a private instance with only your house in it? (people can still visit either way.)

Groups in one instance means it’s higher to be likely you could not be with your friends. How about your friends list can denote who shows up in your “community”, like if you have mutual friends you will always see their houses available?

Still run into space issues though. Well, unless it’s based off in the Mists where actual real estate space doesn’t matter

2. Construction, what level of involvement would you like? building it block by block? A room by room function where you can pick and choose rooms to add? A series of set designs?

I love games like Minecraft and Terraria’s control over what you can do and the sheer RIDICULOUS amount of effort people can put into doing things terribly unique with construction. I’d rather they stick to those games than Guild Wars 2. I’m sorry, don’t get me wrong, those of you who do things like rebuild Minas Tirith or make soaring citadels of glass and stone which look like they took hours – I salute you. But trying to satisfy you with that level of control is going to drive the developers MAD. MAD I SAY.

What I’d expect is a modular approach. You can choose a floorplan/blueprint from a few predeveloped shells with “X large rooms, Y small rooms, and Z floors”. Then you can pick and choose from a list of “large rooms”, “small rooms” to fill it in. Things like a trophy hall, a crafting workshop, or something just decorative . . . like your asura has a golem foundry, my human has a chapel to Grenth, his charr can have a room where he works on his charrzooka or mortar system. But almost all of the basic rooms come unfurnished.

Then you can use artisans or interior decorator NPCs to create from a menu using some materials (not huge amounts though) to craft furniture or decorations which get placed like siege blueprints – you get a bundle item and a red outline turning green where you can place it. Standing close you can target it for context specific things . . . like sitting on the couch or posing before a trophy on the wall.

3.Functionalities, I think we can all agree at a basic level housing should allow for some storage and display of trophies/achievements/weapons/armor , in addition to this what would you like to see, Farming? nodes? intractable objects? side missions?

Trophy showing off? Yes definitely.

Nodes? Ehh, yes, might be nice. Link it to what your home instance currently has available and you can either use your house or your home instance. And based on level you can have access to crafting materials of varying tiers (but not Tier 6 without actually doing something to earn them) such as a rich ore node or a few trees, or a garden you can choose what to plant for availability tomorrow. Like you will get sometimes a seed from gathering which lets you spawn a patch of that gathering node for plants in a garden.

The last probably is a bit much and prone to causing shakeups in the economy for food. Oh well?

4. Interior customization, placing objects within the house how would you like it to work?

I covered it above.

5. Getting items, How do you get items to put in your house?

Decorations either through your interior decorator crafting them, achievements from Living Story or retroactive, potential rewards from champion bags, or from chests out in the world. Say, chests in Orr have a chance to give humans an icon of one of the Six Gods looted from the Holy City of Arah . . . or charr a piece of Pact weaponry to hang on the wall as memory to those who were lost . . . or sylvari getting a sprout traced back to Caladbolg’s influence on Orr?

In other words, decorations either basic and available to everyone or things which require you to go adventure and get them.

6. Linking to other content, is there anything you would like to link with housing? (i.e in a perfect vision of the future I could walk out of my house onto an airship dock and take my airship into combat)

Much like with Guild Halls, you can buy servants/assistants who would do things like . . . an Arena Master who would let you go to Heart of the Mists, a Mist War Veteran who could drop you to WvW, an Asuran Travel Facilitator who could send you to any Asura Gate destination in a major city. Or for a FLAT FEE (say, 2s 50c) drop you at any Waypoint not contested you have discovered. (Big enough an expense it’s possibly cheaper to move to a city close then travel, small enough that it’s preferable to reach some long-distance locations like Orr).

DiogoSilva.7089:

CONCEPT FOR OPEN-WORLD MINI-SCENARIOS

And now let me expand this idea further.

There would be many, many mini-scenarios to unlock, and players would get access to a tome (or a UI menu) that would register all of mini-scenarios completed. The entire Journey would not to simply do one of those, but all of them, unlocking many rewards along the way, and a final one for them all.

But how would the player get to know where to find those mini-scenarios, and what would players need to meet a specific condition to get the unique reward out of each mini-scenario?

Basically, as players do orders quests, follow the main storyline, or even talk to NPCs (to which players would be guided to, mostly through orders quests and main story too), players would unlock hints and fragments about hidden places, special powers, etc. Those hints and fragments would be automatically placed on the tome/ menu UI, and upon collecting all of them for a specific mini-scenario, they would be able to get the unique reward out of it, get a vague map marking to where those mini-dungeons could be found (players would still need to explore that zone of the map until they find the exact place), and they would be able to activate the required pre- dynamic events on-demand (until they got the unique reward – once so, they would lose the ability to start the pre-events on demand).

THE HERO’S JOURNEY

Each quest for each scenario would have the following gameplay and storyline plot structure:

Exposition

• Players would aknowledge the existence of a specific “quest” from anywhere within a story or orders mission, and be guided to several NPCs and locations where they would be able to collect hints, myths, fragments or relics by exploring the world (and specifically outposts, towns, temples, etc).
• Each hint, myth, etc would tell us a bit of Tyria’s lore, and introduce us to a mini-storyline. Also, the NPC’s dialogue would show us how the NPCs themselves feel or think about those hints, whispers and myths, making the world feel more lively.

Inciting Incident

• But not all of it would revolve around NPC talking or relic-finding, no. Somewhere through this journey, some (otherwise automatic) open-world events would be activated on demand. By this time, the mini-storyline would start to develop, an antagonist or a problem would be presented to us, and the story would get more interesting. Also, of course, battles.

Rising action

• Finally, the player has collected all the hints/ whispers/ myths/ relics/ fragments, and they have done some required events along the way! Their tome/ menu UI is now filled with new Tyrian lore! And not only that, but players would finally have a vague idea of where to go for the epic, challenging dynamic event chain!
• After exploring the map a bit on the location where it is expected to find that epic event, the player/s would start it on-demand, and a map-wide message would follow.
• The event itself would be a bit longer than normal, the story would get more intense/ dangerous/ intriguing (mostly through gameplay), and the path to the mini-scenario would open up at the end, with another map-wide message again.

Climax

• The mini-dungeon/ mini-scenario itself. Some skippable(?) cutscenes (yes, in the open world!). Story-relevant battle scenarios and boss fights, some lore revelations and plot twists, and some pathos.

Conclusion

• The NPCs involved in the mini-story would get their own stories reach an end. Normal players that joined for the ride would get a simple reward, but the players who were doing this whole quest from the beginning will get, in addition to the normal reward, THE unique reward. Another map-wide message again, this time announcing the names of those players, as they get bathed in light for all other players nearby to see. Their own role in this mini-story would end, too, and be bestowed with a new subclass tier/ mastery/ advancement.
• The tome/ menu UI would register this whole quest’s sequence, and store all Tyrian’s lore discovered.

The Never Ending Journey

• Still plenty more epic events and mini-scenarios to unlock! Many of them probably harder or more complex than the previous ones, and to be found in other zones. Many more stories to be told! Much of Tyria’s world to be yet discovered!
• And Anet can simply add more stories in new patches, making use of existing maps, meta living world stories or existing lore, or even when adding entire new zones to explore.

Malchior.5042:

Conski Deshan.2057:

ColinJohanson.2394:

The event idea is an interesting one, but it doesn’t feel like a “grand journey” so to speak. Do you feel like if we asked you to do 90 different events in a month, and that allowed your ranger to say become a Druid, you’d feel like that was a cool system?

By grand journey do you mean in difficulty or length?, As I assume you want all players to be able to unlock their “subclass” fairly soon after hitting 80?

Also could we get a weigh in on your opinion on housing?

I’ll offer a counter-view here. First off, what would you consider “fairly soon,” Conski?

• IMO, why should a person unlock their subclass fairly soon after hitting 80? Hitting 80 the person just reaches their last trait points, their max level gear, and all the other elements to cement their play.

• Me personally, I’d be ok with a week-long journey (hardcores could probably rush it out within a few days) that focused more on “unlocking/discovering potential” within your character.

• The idea above that adds different weight to all the events sounds decent, but also sounds incredibly time-consuming to Arenanet. Colin, I probably could do 90 events in a week, but I wouldn’t enjoy it. Instead of deciding on a number first, I’d focus on the flavor of each event being run. I would expect a Ranger hoping to “Ascend” (hehehe) to Druid would do an event track or whatever that sent said Ranger all over Tyria doing Druidy or Rangerish things (those are words ).

• This could conclude with a new instance/dungeon or something where a party completes the final task to “unlock their potential” together. This adds additional merit that GW 2 is a game that’s built on large encounters, profession combos, and player interaction. After said final task is completed, each party member would unlock their prospective track, and they can all rejoice together at their accomplishment.

I just want to make it very very clear that I in no way want my personal character progression dependant on group content. – read 5 man dungeon. In no way. Sure give that option for people who want to party up but it is my own character and as such I should be able to do it.

To increace population in different zones you should have zone specific skins (could just be reskined current meshes even) that unlock at specific karma verdors in the zone when you complete a certain number of dynamic events there. Say, first item to unlock in kesseks hills is boots at 30 events. Next is gloves at 60. Etc… They could be purchased with karma as you are rewarded with that for the events. Being skins only they would be very horizontal.

I also like the idea of using your order to give you daily quests around the world. Things like bounty hunter (champions) treasure hunter (jumping puzzles, mini dungeons) scavenger (collect items from specific mobs) etc… Order leader would reward you with chest/laurels/whatever when all are completed.

I think this would make the players feel more involved in the world, and would help new players and alts not feel so alone.

I think

Malchior.5042:

• The idea above that adds different weight to all the events sounds decent, but also sounds incredibly time-consuming to Arenanet. Colin, I probably could do 90 events in a week, but I wouldn’t enjoy it. Instead of deciding on a number first, I’d focus on the flavor of each event being run. I would expect a Ranger hoping to “Ascend” (hehehe) to Druid would do an event track or whatever that sent said Ranger all over Tyria doing Druidy or Rangerish things (those are words ).

Oh it can be done in an easy and less time-consuming fashion within four weeks’ time with a team of three people.

Step 1: Decide what the general thrust of “Druid” rangers would be. Or “Gladiator” warriors, whatever.

Step 2: Identify 5 events which almost perfectly coincide with the feel of the class lore or playstyle wise. Give these a weight so doing 4 would be enough.

Step 3: Zone by zone look at chains of events and evaluate them. Disqualify Living Story events, World Boss events, and other content which isn’t always available. Each chain gets a weight so doing 12 would be enough on their own, but they need to reach the end of a chain to apply. (In other words, “Event Trains” are given incentive to stick to the end and not do the most lucrative bits.)

Step 4: All other events not chains and not disqualified in Step 3 get a weight based on the profession of NPCs involved, the locale involved, or other flavor. Make it so doing 24 of these (and solely these) will get you to the end. The slowest, but easiest method.

I just discovered this thread, please forgive me in case I am posting stuff that already has been suggested somewhere in the past 46 pages.

Guild Wars 2 desperately needs more activities to allow our characters horizontal advancement, for this is what the game is supposed to be all about, no? Currently, I have to admit that I experience times when there is simply nothing to work for me anymore, particularly when the current bit of Living Story is completed or I don’t consider it interesting (unfortunately that happens – and it’s not meant as criticism, just statement of a fact). So what the game could do with is some more long term projects we could work towards, other than the legendary weapons.

I guess what I would love most in terms of horizontal progression are

a) Player housing.

Player housing is awesome for horizontal progression because it’s a cosmetic thing that doesn’t make anyone more powerful, but can offer a lot of motivation. There could be all sorts of quests, both dynamic and static, that would reward little things here and little things there to improve your dwelling with. Furniture, murals, carpets etc.

b) Clothing

“But, but,” you might say, for it’s not that there is no clothing to collect in Guild Wars 2. And you would be right, of course. But for a game that’s a lot about collecting nice looking gear, there is a distinct lack of variety in Guild Wars 2. Let’s face it, the current idea of armour design in GW2 is quite uniform. Medium gear is trenchcoat. Light gear is robe. Heavy gear usually features some version of armoured puffy skirt. And so on. There is little motivation to get more than one set of gear in this game – the trenchcoat you like best, or the robe you like best. In real life we don’t wear the same style every day. One day we might wear a sweater with jeans, the next it’s a blouse with a skirt. What I mean is that an actual wardrobe of -different- looking gear would be awesome to collect. If some of which would actually drop in the game and not -only- the cash store, that is (and someone would finally replace that awful Transmutation stone system with something better!).

What I (personally) don’t want is more achievements of the “Kill 1000 goblins” kind. That’s boring and unimaginative. I don’t hunt that sort of achievement in any game. What I also don’t need is more temporary quests rewarding yet another backpack skin or yet another helmet. What would outright drive me from the game is locking more nice stuff inside more Tequatl-like raid content as some suggested. I left a number of MMO because raiding made me feel like a second class player for not wishing to do that sort of content and consequently not having access to any desirable rewards in these games. I don’t need another experience like that. I bought Guild Wars 2 to have a non-frustrating MMO experience that I can play MY way. As was promised.

If you forgive me the comparison to another game: One MMO to look at for horizontal progression ideas is Star Trek Online. That game really got horizontal progression at endgame level right. There is a metric ton of stuff to do, and all activities at endgame level reward the same tier of gear (just with different stat sets and looks). Reputation projects to work on, a queue full of interesting group instances to run, open world PvE battles etc. There is stuff for everyone and for any mood. That is sort of what I could see Guild Wars 2 moving towards: A number of progression projects to work on that reward cosmetic/vanity items and gear (or even stat gear, as long as there is no additional tier being intoduced – we want horizontal progression, after all!), and a dozen different activities to pick from to fuel these projects. So people can do what they feel like and yet still get the same nice stuff.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Thanks folks lots of really great ideas, concepts and discussion here!
~

P1

The conversation is way to much focus on one element. Expanding the profession. That keeps people busy for a little while but overall does not really add much. Making it part of the personal story is really bad. Then you are forced to do the personal story, something I personally don’t like because when I play an MMO I want to play a multi-player game not some single-player game inside it. Thats why the personal story never got my attention.

There is so much to gain if it comes to horizontal progression, why such a focus on that one element. I will tell you what I did in other MMO’s (said that before) that I consider horizontal progression and that can keep people bus for a long time.

Mini collection. That whole element is not available in GW2 in the way that it’s really a play element. Lets face it, most of the mini’s are behind a gold-grind (TP) or the gem-store (gold or money). Other where behind temporary LS content (and so not TB). But there are almost none you can really go for, works toward. While that should be able with all mini’s.
To make this really part of the game and part of horizontal progression take all those mini’s that have been released during GW2’s existence and throw them really into the game (open world) in a similar way as one mini now also drops from Tequatl (all mini’s should be available in such a way).
Some mini’s can drop from a world boss, others can drop in a dungeons, other can drop from a group of mobs, some can drop from a quest (then you need to have the more traditional quest).
This is a form of horizontal progression that can keep people busy for months if not years.

Now that whole element is gone because most people already know there are many mini’s they can’t get anymore (so then the idea of collecting them all stops) and the ones they still can get are behind a very boring gold-grind. Even the fact that they add a mini in almost every LS is not helping while they are then available in the game (temporary). That means that if you want to collect them you need to be going for that in every LS. I know thats the design philosophy behind it and so get also people to buy them (or gold) from the gem-store but the fact is that is takes the joy out of collecting them. So they need to be farmable (get them form a specific place you can work toward.. always) in stead of require a general (gold) grind to then buy them.

You can do exactly the same with mounts.

Then there could be fun crafts (Crafts like engineering, just making fun items or maybe even gardening and so on). Crafts where you can create a fun (maybe not super useful but fun) item almost every level so it’s not like now grinding up to lvl 500 to then being able to create what you want but you have fun all the way up.
You should also need to go all over the world to collect recipe’s (much in a similar way as the mini’s). And allow people to really farm the stuff they need. Recipe’s but also the other materials. Now also crafting requires mainly grinding gold to buy the required items / materials because you can’t really farm many of the materials itself. And every time people find a way to farm items they need it get patched out. We really need to have that game element in this game. (Like a guild-member once said after yet another possibility to farm something was patched out. “I really want to play this game, but ArenaNet does not let me”)

That farming and working your way up is horizontal progression in a fun way, it’s going for your goal. Grinding for gold while I understand why you want players to do it that way (makes gold more valuable and so gems more interesting to buy) takes away a big part of the game mechanic and horizontal progression.

Make dyes account bound so they also become something you can really work towards (collecting all colors on all chars makes that impossible) and then don’t work with once again a general drop and a general change to get a specific color. That makes also collecting dyes once again a gold-grind (or buy gems to convert to gold) to then buy the color you need / want. But let for example one boss drop one specific color and let a dungeon drop a specific color and so on.

Pets for ranger. Make that system way more dynamic (no predefined list of pets) so people can go and find rare pets the developers did not even think of. It’s a game element on itself in many mmo’s and once again horizontal progression.

p2

Traditional quest also can reward specific items and send you all over the world. So they send you on an explorer journey. Now you run on the map looking for heards and poi’s and vista’s but it does not feel like a journey it feels like just crossing of a list of locations. Because of that exploration is also less of a journey in this game while it could also be seen as part of horizontal progression.

These thinks, with the exception of dyes, where forms of horizontal progressions that could keep me busy for years in other MMO’s but they simply don’t exist in GW2 as a real game-play element, and for as far as they exist they are behind a grind for gold or gem-store but that means they don’t really exist as a fun game-element. And they can all be seen as a form of horizontal progression that can keep people busy for months maybe years.

Malchior.5042:

Conski Deshan.2057:

ColinJohanson.2394:

The event idea is an interesting one, but it doesn’t feel like a “grand journey” so to speak. Do you feel like if we asked you to do 90 different events in a month, and that allowed your ranger to say become a Druid, you’d feel like that was a cool system?

By grand journey do you mean in difficulty or length?, As I assume you want all players to be able to unlock their “subclass” fairly soon after hitting 80?

Also could we get a weigh in on your opinion on housing?

I’ll offer a counter-view here. First off, what would you consider “fairly soon,” Conski?

• IMO, why should a person unlock their subclass fairly soon after hitting 80? Hitting 80 a person has just reached their last trait points, their max level gear, and all the other elements to cement their play.

• Me personally, I’d be ok with a week-long journey (hardcores could probably rush it out within a few days) that focused more on “unlocking/discovering potential” within your character.

• The idea above that adds different weight to all the events sounds decent, but also sounds incredibly time-consuming to Arenanet. Colin, I probably could do 90 events in a week, but I wouldn’t enjoy it. Instead of deciding on a number first, I’d focus on the flavor of each event being run. I would expect a Ranger hoping to “Ascend” (hehehe) to Druid would do an event track or whatever that sent said Ranger all over Tyria doing Druidy or Rangerish things (those are words ).

• This could conclude with a new instance/dungeon or something where a party completes the final task to “unlock their potential” together. This adds additional merit that GW 2 is a game that’s built on large encounters, profession combos, and player interaction. After said final task is completed, each party member would unlock their prospective track, and they can all rejoice together at their accomplishment.

I was basing that off what other people had said, that’s why I was asking for clarification.
I would consider a week to be a very short journey, by grand journey I was considering a month long thing minimum.
If difficulty wise I would consider 50% failure rate, which wouldn’t fit in with the ease of access people expect here.

If you do choose difficulty I think the doppelganger solo fight would be a perfect choice.

Conski Deshan.2057:

If you do choose difficulty I think the doppelganger solo fight would be a perfect choice.

You mean the one Rangers could almost do eyes-closed with the proper skill selection? Sure

I’ll just throw my own additional blue sky idea out there.

The secret world’s skill wheel is very neat. It’s a heck of a chore to fill it all out but everybody eventually can, and it feels very horizontal.

But how to do that in gw2?

Blue sky – say we classify existing events and activities in game along three axis – offense, compassion and guile. New skills will be arranged in a kind of tree divided up along those lines, and be obtainable for skill points once you’ve hit a certain offense/compassion/guile level.

You could even tie this in with the existing personality system; say you get a multiplier for offensive xp gain if your character is especially ferocious.

That heart where you disguise as a bandit and go in and wreck a joint? Guile. Capping a keep? Offense. Defending one? Guile/Compassion. Rezzing? Compassion. Existing dungeons would almost all be offense, but perhaps that leads to thoughts of how ‘alternate’ paths or bonus tasks could be laid out – save some slaves as a bonus objective, get more loot and some compassion.

I love the ideas involving collecting hints and story fragments, as well as the zone-specific skins to unlock with dynamic events happening in that zone.

Speaking of that .. Maybe even add an encyclopaedia of the world to unlock bit by bit, containing lore and stories from all over Tyria, illustrated with artwork like in the living story tab. Couple that with things that now give a boring achievement point reward! For example: after killing a number of enemies, along with a nice Slayer achievement you unlock the creature’s page containing lore and history. Perhaps possible material drops (such as basilisks in Queensdale dropping small scales, and those in Frostgorge dropping armoured scales). A lot of existing artwork and wiki pages could basically be reused in the encyclopaedia, but it would feel really rewarding unlocking that in the game. Well, at least to me. I love things like those little booklets with the missions in GW1.^^

ColinJohanson.2394:

cesmode.4257:

ColinJohanson.2394:

A lot of the ideas boiled down into variations of one of these two options, and really both have a lot of cool concepts and ideas. Can folks think of anything else that’s a bit more outside the box for something bigger?

I had suggested several times about Global Dominance system. Similar to WvW…we as players and as a server, complete events across the entire map of Tyria and receive passive bonuses based on the % of the map that we control as players. So if we leave entire zones(say the lesser traveled zones) to be completely occupied by centaurs, for example, we won’t be receiving maximum benefits. And you can use most of the existing dynamic events to accomplish this. There are many DEs that take over way points and camps that we as players can complete and push enemy NPCs back…thus acquiring a larger portion of the world.

This encourages players to play in more than one zone, get sthem out in the world, etc.

On top of this, put in a reward system for completing unique(different) dynamic events in a month. I.E. Complete 90 unique dynamic events in January and receive a Cesmode mini(just kidding). But you get the picture.

Is that big enough and outside the box?

The global dominance is a really interesting concept, and something we played with a bit back in Gw1 with the luxons/kurzicks but never really pushed far enough to make into a compelling system. Some questions and challenges that immediately come to mind with this would include: How would players playing in an overflow map make a difference, or feel like their time is being well spent? How would this work if we pursued underflow servers? How would this work for worlds that have relatively medium/low populations, or for players who play at off hours (say Australians). ? How would new players understand, and be motivated by this system, and should they be? And most importantly: How would this result in unlocking an advanced profession or advanced horizontal progression for your character? [I get how a system like this could be used for more world bonus specific rewards which is really cool, but I don’t fully see the character specific journey which was my original question]

The event idea is an interesting one, but it doesn’t feel like a “grand journey” so to speak. Do you feel like if we asked you to do 90 different events in a month, and that allowed your ranger to say become a Druid, you’d feel like that was a cool system?

Anything could be acceptable but I wouldn’t consider such a ‘make bars go up’ system cool. No more than interacting 100 pinatas. I guess if the events themselves were good then that could change the answer.

As for the luxon/kurzick thing UGGGGGH. “Oh look! You are on the wrong side of the wrong side of the map so now you have to hop over to a different town to use a vendor.” “Meh … I’ll just hop over to the guild hall.”

ColinJohanson.2394:

The global dominance is a really interesting concept, and something we played with a bit back in Gw1 with the luxons/kurzicks but never really pushed far enough to make into a compelling system. Some questions and challenges that immediately come to mind with this would include: How would players playing in an overflow map make a difference, or feel like their time is being well spent? How would this work if we pursued underflow servers? How would this work for worlds that have relatively medium/low populations, or for players who play at off hours (say Australians). ? How would new players understand, and be motivated by this system, and should they be? And most importantly: How would this result in unlocking an advanced profession or advanced horizontal progression for your character? [I get how a system like this could be used for more world bonus specific rewards which is really cool, but I don’t fully see the character specific journey which was my original question]

The event idea is an interesting one, but it doesn’t feel like a “grand journey” so to speak. Do you feel like if we asked you to do 90 different events in a month, and that allowed your ranger to say become a Druid, you’d feel like that was a cool system?

I think the Global Dominance idea could represent a great addition to the game. Maybe a good solution for most of the problems would be to link this idea with an Alliance system.

Players (including those in underflow/overflow) can complete specific Events associated with the Dominance system (I imagine a border similar to the one between luxon and kurzick in GW1 in which players try to push back assaults from one of the Dragon’s minions) and they can receive gold, karma, experience and a new reward represented by Faction points.

Then players can spend factions points is particular outposts to contribute to their Faction (for instance by building defenses or new weapons for a counter-assault). The more they spend the higher is the PvE bonus they receive and the stronger becomes their Faction. In addition, by spending Faction points player could be able to increase a permanent score that is used to unlock Faction (PvE) skills, new skins, or even specific profession specializations.

If players are able to push back the minions assault they can prepare a counter-assault and conquer more advance outposts. Maintaining these new advanced outposts they will be able to earn more Faction points and unlock additional PvE bonuses, and maybe new merchants with special items. Obviously it should be relatively difficult to maintain these conquests (I imagine the most advanced outpost attacked by a Dragon Champion like Tequatl).

In addition, player could be able to obtain Faction points by completing other Events and quests all over the world (maybe new Events/Quests associated with the three Orders for example).

There are alot of ideas here about events happening in Tyria (outside of the standard DE’s). For me, the game is about immersing myself and exploring, etc. When scarlets invasions came out, i really enjoyed these. Someone wrote about a map sized event/events like the invasions, but where if you held the objectives then players would gain a boost; this sounds a fab idea! I think maybe imnplement a player boost system where afk players cannot get them.

ColinJohanson.2394:

The global dominance is a really interesting concept, and something we played with a bit back in Gw1 with the luxons/kurzicks but never really pushed far enough to make into a compelling system. Some questions and challenges that immediately come to mind with this would include: How would players playing in an overflow map make a difference, or feel like their time is being well spent? How would this work if we pursued underflow servers? How would this work for worlds that have relatively medium/low populations, or for players who play at off hours (say Australians). ? How would new players understand, and be motivated by this system, and should they be? And most importantly: How would this result in unlocking an advanced profession or advanced horizontal progression for your character? [I get how a system like this could be used for more world bonus specific rewards which is really cool, but I don’t fully see the character specific journey which was my original question]

Hi Colin, I’ll respond in a list fashion:

How would players playing in an overflow map make a difference, or feel like their time is being well spent? — Treat this as you do the WvW system. Queue for the zone, and head to another zone in the mean time. There are many great zones to choose from. I highly, highly doubt every zone will be so populated that you cannot play in any zone. Keep in mind people will still be in other parts of the game such as sPvP, dungeons, WvW, etc. This is just to get some of the players out of LA and into the world.

How would this work for worlds that have relatively medium/low populations, or for players who play at off hours (say Australians). ? — Are you able to tune event frequency per server? If so, thats something to explore and tweak overtime as you see the population ebb and flow of servers. But then again, this is an issue dealt with in WvW. How are you handling it there? If the answer is that you aren’t due to XYZ reasons, then the same applies here.

How would this work if we pursued underflow servers? — I honestly don’t know and is a very big ‘what if’ if you chose to go with underflow. I suppose you wouldn’t be able to. Its a trade off, but one that I think is OK because with the GD system you wouldn’t need underflow servers…many people should be out in the world at that point.

How would new players understand, and be motivated by this system, and should they be? — Utilize the scouting system. You put these scouts into the world to show us key points of interest in the local area. Expand that system further to show us some more of the events that contribute to the GD system.

How would this result in unlocking an advanced profession or advanced horizontal progression for your character? — As some other posters have suggested…have zone based skins that are unlocked by participating in many zone events. Also, as you continue to level at max level, via skill points, you can also open up a GUI that has a honeycomb, triangle, or some shape that has vexels or boxes or something that require skill points to be spent to work toward horizontal progression skins. So if Greatswords are in the upper right hand corner, you spend your skill points in that direction until you reach the unlockable Greatsword skins.

Aside from the last paragraph, most of these systems are already in game for you to expand on. BTW, I never played GW1, but it sounds like something I would have been interested in, especially with a system like this.

ColinJohanson.2394:

The event idea is an interesting one, but it doesn’t feel like a “grand journey” so to speak. Do you feel like if we asked you to do 90 different events in a month, and that allowed your ranger to say become a Druid, you’d feel like that was a cool system?

I’d prefer a personal storyline branch but it might need another system in WvW … and that’s a tricky one to work out. Will have to think some more on that.

ColinJohanson.2394:

The event idea is an interesting one, but it doesn’t feel like a “grand journey” so to speak. Do you feel like if we asked you to do 90 different events in a month, and that allowed your ranger to say become a Druid, you’d feel like that was a cool system?

Assuming I can change my Druid back to a Ranger as well, this would be interesting.
For me though 90 different events sounds like quite the feat of commitment, not really a “grand journey”.

Large amounts of filler missions does not equate to a long and grand journey.
Missions and events that touch upon the Lore of Guild Wars in meaningful ways create the grandness for me.

For example: I would value a 20 event chain dealing with the Zephyr nomads more than 80 events where I collected and killed random things.

Now if it is possible to give us meaningful missions and have a large amount of them, that would truly be a grand journey.

ColinJohanson.2394:

cesmode.4257:

ColinJohanson.2394:

A lot of the ideas boiled down into variations of one of these two options, and really both have a lot of cool concepts and ideas. Can folks think of anything else that’s a bit more outside the box for something bigger?

I had suggested several times about Global Dominance system. Similar to WvW…we as players and as a server, complete events across the entire map of Tyria and receive passive bonuses based on the % of the map that we control as players. So if we leave entire zones(say the lesser traveled zones) to be completely occupied by centaurs, for example, we won’t be receiving maximum benefits. And you can use most of the existing dynamic events to accomplish this. There are many DEs that take over way points and camps that we as players can complete and push enemy NPCs back…thus acquiring a larger portion of the world.

This encourages players to play in more than one zone, get sthem out in the world, etc.

On top of this, put in a reward system for completing unique(different) dynamic events in a month. I.E. Complete 90 unique dynamic events in January and receive a Cesmode mini(just kidding). But you get the picture.

Is that big enough and outside the box?

The global dominance is a really interesting concept, and something we played with a bit back in Gw1 with the luxons/kurzicks but never really pushed far enough to make into a compelling system. Some questions and challenges that immediately come to mind with this would include: How would players playing in an overflow map make a difference, or feel like their time is being well spent? How would this work if we pursued underflow servers? How would this work for worlds that have relatively medium/low populations, or for players who play at off hours (say Australians). ? How would new players understand, and be motivated by this system, and should they be? And most importantly: How would this result in unlocking an advanced profession or advanced horizontal progression for your character? [I get how a system like this could be used for more world bonus specific rewards which is really cool, but I don’t fully see the character specific journey which was my original question]

The event idea is an interesting one, but it doesn’t feel like a “grand journey” so to speak. Do you feel like if we asked you to do 90 different events in a month, and that allowed your ranger to say become a Druid, you’d feel like that was a cool system?

You couldn’t really do global dominance based upon the main server map control. If you did, it based upon server it wouldn’t be global. There’s some high level problems with servers that should be addressed to really pull something like this off.

The main thing is that servers really only have meaning for WvW since players are free to travel between servers. This might be what you want to design things around in the future. Honestly there’s a whole CDI that we could do on servers. Ideally for servers I think you ask players if they want to be in an RP server or not, ask players if they want to be in a low/medium/high population server and just have 6 versions of “main” maps then do overflows for those 6 types. This should help reduce if not eliminate the need for underflow server logic. Just use the old server names as WvW teams, because that’s effectively what they are already.

Back to global dominance. Regardless of how you do servers, leave them the same/change them. If there are different instances of each map (assuming this will continue to be true), you can’t do map control from a territory perspective, because it won’t be the same for each map. You can’t include the overflow servers in the calcuation, because they come and go. You can’t base it strictly upon the perminent instances of maps, because overflows exist. So map control by territory is not feasible. An alternative would be to utilize a calculation involving all active global dominance events between all servers (perminent, overflow, underflow, regardless of name, etc.) we’re talking global, or at least server regional (NA/EU/etc.). A lot of effort would have to be put into balancing and scaling these global dominance events per server, and you’d have to figure out how you want to score it. But I think at the highest level it all has to be based upon summing events ACTIVELY being consummed by players per server region, per server name, per each overflow and perminent server.

Myur.1509:

ColinJohanson.2394:

The global dominance is a really interesting concept, and something we played with a bit back in Gw1 with the luxons/kurzicks but never really pushed far enough to make into a compelling system. Some questions and challenges that immediately come to mind with this would include: How would players playing in an overflow map make a difference, or feel like their time is being well spent? How would this work if we pursued underflow servers? How would this work for worlds that have relatively medium/low populations, or for players who play at off hours (say Australians). ? How would new players understand, and be motivated by this system, and should they be? And most importantly: How would this result in unlocking an advanced profession or advanced horizontal progression for your character? [I get how a system like this could be used for more world bonus specific rewards which is really cool, but I don’t fully see the character specific journey which was my original question]

The event idea is an interesting one, but it doesn’t feel like a “grand journey” so to speak. Do you feel like if we asked you to do 90 different events in a month, and that allowed your ranger to say become a Druid, you’d feel like that was a cool system?

I think the Global Dominance idea could represent a great addition to the game. Maybe a good solution for most of the problems would be to link this idea with an Alliance system.

Players (including those in underflow/overflow) can complete specific Events associated with the Dominance system (I imagine a border similar to the one between luxon and kurzick in GW1 in which players try to push back assaults from one of the Dragon’s minions) and they can receive gold, karma, experience and a new reward represented by Faction points.

Then players can spend factions points is particular outposts to contribute to their Faction (for instance by building defenses or new weapons for a counter-assault). The more they spend the higher is the PvE bonus they receive and the stronger becomes their Faction. In addition, by spending Faction points player could be able to increase a permanent score that is used to unlock Faction (PvE) skills, new skins, or even specific profession specializations.

If players are able to push back the minions assault they can prepare a counter-assault and conquer more advance outposts. Maintaining these new advanced outposts they will be able to earn more Faction points and unlock additional PvE bonuses, and maybe new merchants with special items. Obviously it should be relatively difficult to maintain these conquests (I imagine the most advanced outpost attacked by a Dragon Champion like Tequatl).

In addition, player could be able to obtain Faction points by completing other Events and quests all over the world (maybe new Events/Quests associated with the three Orders for example).

Additional Ideas:

Maybe you can have a NPC representing each Order in each outpost you conquer. Then players can choose which order they want to support:

-Vigil: recruit mercenaries and siege weapons to help players during attacks
-Durmand priory: build new magical defenses for the outpost (e.g., magical turrets)
-Order of whispers: organize sabotage missions to reduce the strength of enemies assaults

Spending Faction points this way players can increase one of three different scores which represent their influence with each Order, and they can unlock, for instance, specific PvE skills, or equip skins.

If players play enough they can have a high influence with all the three Orders, so they can have access to all the contents.

[I forgot: obviously players in underflow/overflow can earn Faction points and spend them to increase the power of the Faction (and thus the PvE bonus) in their server]

ColinJohanson.2394:

And most importantly: How would this result in unlocking an advanced profession or advanced horizontal progression for your character? [I get how a system like this could be used for more world bonus specific rewards which is really cool, but I don’t fully see the character specific journey which was my original question]

The event idea is an interesting one, but it doesn’t feel like a “grand journey” so to speak. Do you feel like if we asked you to do 90 different events in a month, and that allowed your ranger to say become a Druid, you’d feel like that was a cool system.

No, just please NO!

This is a terrible system, and I think you get what we want completely the wrong way around.

We want more skills and more traits to have more diversity and really build a character that suits OUR wishes.

What you’re doing with your subclasses, is once again make DEVS design character templates for players to follow.

Worst of all, you’ll go and produce a lot of content which is EXCLUSIVE to a particular subclass and thus cannot be used by any other player character. This results in a lot of work that doesn’t have much value to an individual player. You should make content for ALL classes, and let players cherry-pick from that freely, and create their own subclass that way!

In ultima online, I can combine skills from 50 different professions and choose become a vampire-paladin-warrior-samurai also known as Sampire, a class designed and created by the players. And sampires come in 100’s of different flavours, mine for example doesn’t have bushido and has much less chivalry, but instead has bandage healing and parries with a shield instead of a 2h weapon.

What you want to do, is give us a ‘druid’ subclass. With a few new standard abilities that are unique to the druid and cannot be creatively combined in any way. You’re once again determining what is good for us, instead of giving us any freedom over our characters.

Worst of all, you propose us to do some chore as task, that has the subclass as ‘reward’ at the end. Sounds an awful lot like vertical progression to me. If this is about horizontal progression, there should be a horizontal approach to acquiring new skills, meaning that like in GW1, they’re split in many little bits which are ALL available for capture at the same time, waiting for you to capture. It’s up to you how you prioritize their acquisition. I think a similar system to the hearts would work, heart-quest like things that each unlock an individual skill/trait/etc upon completion. The only bad thing is that GW2 has so many character levels and thus many zones are not yet accessible to low level characters so that unfortunately means that they can’t capture everything right from the start. But yeah, having levels in GW2 was one of the biggest mistakes anyway.

We want houses, we want more skills.

WE DONT WANT SUBCLASSES!

ColinJohanson.2394:

Thanks folks lots of really great ideas, concepts and discussion here!

I think the biggest thing I was trying to get at with my question is: what should the journey towards an alternative system of horizontal progression really be like?

Folks talked a lot about different ways you could say acquire skills other than the current system, but that’s really more a change to an existing skill acquisition system, as opposed to the journey of unlocking something like an advanced profession (or masteries) as some of you discussed.

Say for example, we decided to allow your profession to gain an additional mastery as Nike and Chuggs in particular discussed above. I think we have a lot of fun ideas in here for the journey unlock specific aspects of that mastery, but what if you first had to unlock the core “mastery” track, which then allowed you collect the smaller components? What kind of experience do you think would be compelling here as an over-all journey?

Some of the ideas I’ve really enjoyed so far from this thread include ->

• Additional story lines with your orders that allow you complete or unlock new masteries/abilities.

• Adding new content to the existing maps (or re-using existing moments) that serves the purpose of being a bit like skill challenges, content on demand that allows you to overcome challenges to allow you unlock various abilities/masteries.

A lot of the ideas boiled down into variations of one of these two options, and really both have a lot of cool concepts and ideas. Can folks think of anything else that’s a bit more outside the box for something bigger?

You could implement a faction system similar to gw1 where much of the content was unlocked through lifetime/current faction points. This flexable system allows for a variety of content to be added to all aspects of the game: PvE, sPvP, and WvW through the addition of Faction-themed content such as: WvW Objectives, GvG’s, Dungeons, World Bosses/Events, LS, and Different sPvP game types.

In terms of unlocking masteries in a WvW context, I’d have to guess that Edge of the Mists is a more appropriate venue for such things – I’m not familiar with the place as I missed the beta period while I was away from home over Nov-Dec. But I’d still go with a quest chain of sorts, just from a different angle.

I’d start by talking to one of the old trainers from Shing Jea Monastery or the Zaishen in the Mists… somewhere. They’d set a series of challenges – for a druid, capturing and defending an area / point / fortification from the dredge, where the new skills are well matched for the situation, would be the start. For a scout, it might be evading such enemies to collect one of those mysterious orbs we don’t see anymore, and escaping again to deliver it back to base. Scenarios from present and past in WvW, basically, tailored to test players on the new build.

Final step would be a 1v1 against the trainer (or a 5v5 for team-oriented builds).

Generally I like the GW1 Battle Isles approach to introducing play styles to WvW players, and a story-driven plot to achieve a similar result in PvE. I’d expect the WvW version to be shorter but somewhat harder to complete.

Here is a (hopefully unique/interesting) thought I had with regards to new skill acquisition -

Large scale events (Temples/Dragons, World Bosses, Champions with 15+ players, etc) could make use of an ‘Effectiveness’ player rating system (to be implemented).

How will this work?

New skills will be categorized into offensive or defensive/support buckets. You need a certain number of points in each bucket to unlock a new skill.

The player will gain these points by participating in said events. If you are in the top X% (or maybe top 3, TBD) in terms of damage dealt, you get a point towards the offensive category. If you are in the top X% in terms of overall healing given, conditions removed, boons/buffs shared, etc (basically anything non-damage oriented), you get a point towards the defensive/support category. Achieving Y of these points in a given category allows you to unlock a skill in that category.

Additionally, this can be calculated in a such a way where your effectiveness rating is scaled based on how long you were there (so the first few people don’t have an unfair advantage). For example, as long as you were participating for 75% of the event time, if you do 10,000 total damage in 10 minutes, vs 7,500 damage in 7.5 minutes, this would be considered ‘equal’. Doing 7,400 damage in 7.4 minutes would be disqualified from the top rewards.

An alternate system would be to just have 1 bucket, in this case it would potentially be difficult to weight offense and defenses fairly in such a way that a DPS build, a hybrid build, and a support build are all on equal footing. The advantage of this approach would be that it does allow for hybrid builds, whereas the first one (in most situations) does not.

Other benefits to this system?

-Event rewards can be (at least loosely) based on how ‘effective’ you were during the event.
-This can be extended to dungeons, where the top player in each ‘category’ unlocks gains a ‘point’ and/or achieves more dungeon tokens.
-Encourages players to actually try their best, instead of autoattacking.
-Promotes greater skill variety (i.e. maybe as an Elementalist I would dust off the old ‘aura share’ build).
-Beneficial to the economy – more food buffs may be bought, players will strive for exotic insignias instead of rare, etc.
-Promotes better player awareness – for example, if I am in what I think is the best DPS build that I can come up with, and am consistently (10+ times in a row) coming up near the bottom of the effectiveness ladder, then I need to tweak my build or improve my playstyle (assuming, at least, over the course of a long event, damage output is equal among all classes in PvE – if not, this IMO is a balance issue)
Thoughts?

ColinJohanson.2394:

Thanks folks lots of really great ideas, concepts and discussion here!

I think the biggest thing I was trying to get at with my question is: what should the journey towards an alternative system of horizontal progression really be like?

Folks talked a lot about different ways you could say acquire skills other than the current system, but that’s really more a change to an existing skill acquisition system, as opposed to the journey of unlocking something like an advanced profession (or masteries) as some of you discussed.

Say for example, we decided to allow your profession to gain an additional mastery as Nike and Chuggs in particular discussed above. I think we have a lot of fun ideas in here for the journey unlock specific aspects of that mastery, but what if you first had to unlock the core “mastery” track, which then allowed you collect the smaller components? What kind of experience do you think would be compelling here as an over-all journey?

Some of the ideas I’ve really enjoyed so far from this thread include ->

• Additional story lines with your orders that allow you complete or unlock new masteries/abilities.

• Adding new content to the existing maps (or re-using existing moments) that serves the purpose of being a bit like skill challenges, content on demand that allows you to overcome challenges to allow you unlock various abilities/masteries.

A lot of the ideas boiled down into variations of one of these two options, and really both have a lot of cool concepts and ideas. Can folks think of anything else that’s a bit more outside the box for something bigger?

Quick note I’d prefer instead of sub-professions, secondary professions as was done with Gw1. I wouldn’t be against sub-professions, it’d be easier to implement honestly, but I preferred the freedom of the Gw1 primary/secondary professions system, because you could make whatever sub-profession you wanted and then some.

As for something more outside the box to Journey through it seems like you’re asking for different systems for people to follow, while I think what we’re asking for is more content within the systems we have. So being outside the box within the boxes we have might be a better idea, since it would hopefully require way less development time and allow for content to be developed more quickly. I have a feeling ANet has barely scratched the surface with what they can do via living story, dymanic events, personal story telling, etc. Of course it doesn’t hurt to have some people working on a big new creative ground breaking feature in parallel.

If there’s anything thing I would say to keep in mind, it’d be to remember to cater towards the solo player too with everything y’all work on, while also thinking of ways to continue promoting collaboration between players and making it easier for players to collaborate.

Finally to the outside of the box stuff. You could try improving upon the idea of Favor of the Gods from Guild Wars 1. Achievements already give individual rewards, but why not give players further incentive to get achievements by giving global benefits. Dailies and Monthlies would obviously have to be excluded, however future living story achievements could count. After the player base gets like 10 million achievement points or whatever the number you could release a new map or something where players could start collecting some of this new horizontal progression stuff. If the playerbase reaches the first tier you could set up a second tier for another really big map release or something with more horizontal progression stuff and story and content. It might be seen as such a big draw the playerbase would grow and the players and devs would have to compete with each other and race to the finish, so the devs would need to have at least 2 maps ready at any given time then set the next tier accordingly so things progress at an achievable pace. The maps could potentially have feels similar to UW, FoW, Urgoz, The Deep, or DoA.

I hope that if a “grand journey” to horizontal progression is introduced, the paths are equally offered to wvw, pvers and dungeon/fractal players or you’ll run into the same issues that we currently have with ascended vertical progression.

Swagger.1459:

I hope that if a “grand journey” to horizontal progression is introduced, the paths are equally offered to wvw, pvers and dungeon/fractal players or you’ll run into the same issues that we currently have with ascended vertical progression.

This, remember, WvW centric players aren’t going to be pleased if they have to farm PvE for their progression, be it horizontal or vertical

Shakkara.2641:

ColinJohanson.2394:

And most importantly: How would this result in unlocking an advanced profession or advanced horizontal progression for your character? [I get how a system like this could be used for more world bonus specific rewards which is really cool, but I don’t fully see the character specific journey which was my original question]

The event idea is an interesting one, but it doesn’t feel like a “grand journey” so to speak. Do you feel like if we asked you to do 90 different events in a month, and that allowed your ranger to say become a Druid, you’d feel like that was a cool system.

No, just please NO!

This is a terrible system, and I think you get what we want completely the wrong way around.

We want more skills and more traits to have more diversity and really build a character that suits OUR wishes.

What you’re doing with your subclasses, is once again make DEVS design character templates for players to follow.

It is somewhat their job, though. Also notable in how we’re coming from a game in which there was so much to choose from and people still fell into broad templates when it came to play. Along with all the weird outliers which weren’t ever actually intended. You know, the perma-SF assassin build which wasn’t supposed to be possible and yet was until it had to be tweaked.

What might actually work better is if the “Druid” subclass, or whatever, consisted of extra options meant to synergize with one of the trait trees. Or with the concept of it majorly built on one, minorly built on two, and not on the fourth. It’s not hard to generalize it instead of what you suggest is “the plan”.

Far as we know, there isn’t a plan for this at all. That’s why we’re having this discussion. And honestly while this might be an answer to horizontal progression, I somehow get the feeling the majority of the game will just gravitate to whatever lets them Champion Train faster.

In a sense, it worries me the players as a whole might not use the horizontal progression everyone here is clamoring for as anything except to fit into the narrow little paths they’ve already carved out and ignore the rest.

Worst of all, you propose us to do some chore as task, that has the subclass as ‘reward’ at the end. Sounds an awful lot like vertical progression to me.

I disagree with how you’re using “vertical progression” because it seems you’re conflating “work for it” with “climb the ladder” type thing. This isn’t something which is going to just be handed out, otherwise nobody is going to really feel like there was any progression horizontal or otherwise . . .

If this is about horizontal progression, there should be a horizontal approach to acquiring new skills, meaning that like in GW1, they’re split in many little bits which are ALL available for capture at the same time, waiting for you to capture. It’s up to you how you prioritize their acquisition.

Except that was very vertical too by your definitions, because you couldn’t capture an elite skill which only appeared in Vabbi (Visions of Regret?) in Kryta and had to progress through quests before that would even be available to you normally. And “Hundred Blades” was only originally available through one mission, at the end of the game, the second-to-last combat. Highly, incredibly resultant of vertical/linear progression.

I think a similar system to the hearts would work, heart-quest like things that each unlock an individual skill/trait/etc upon completion. The only bad thing is that GW2 has so many character levels and thus many zones are not yet accessible to low level characters so that unfortunately means that they can’t capture everything right from the start.

Exactly like Signet of Capture targets, it would appear to me. This can be mitigated by having new masteries (the things you trait into with points) only available from places people should have levels to. Such as putting something requiring 20 Wilderness Survival to trait for in a zone where presumably people are in the right level range to actually use it.

Aeonblade.8709:

Swagger.1459:

I hope that if a “grand journey” to horizontal progression is introduced, the paths are equally offered to wvw, pvers and dungeon/fractal players or you’ll run into the same issues that we currently have with ascended vertical progression.

This, remember, WvW centric players aren’t going to be pleased if they have to farm PvE for their progression, be it horizontal or vertical

Add targets or mechanics for the progression on the parts of the Borderlands or Eternal Battlegrounds outside of the general combat area. Like behind Speldan, or out behind the skritt/centaurs/orchard.

OR . . . OR put it in Edge of the Mists?