Guild Wars 2

The player base as a whole will always take the path of least resistance and with a static itemization system this leads to the reason why.

CoF. Easy and fast.

TA: Longer and harder.

(I use TA as an example because it shows the imbalance the best)

With gear being equal players will always choose CoF over TA because of the grind it takes to get the gear. You can do 50 fast easy runs of CoF and always have people willing top go or 50 slow and hard runs with a limited amount of the community willing to partake.

Also it shows the inherent flaw in different exploration paths

CoF path 2: Easy and fast

CoF path 4: Not easy and not fast

(just using arbitrary path #’s as I have never found a group to do anything but Magg).

Both offer the same reward. The community will always choose Path 2 over path 4. Therefore anyone doing CoF will have a lot harder finding a group for path 4 than path 2.

The only way to fix this is offer unique or specific rewards for either doing different paths or offering up better rewards for doing the more challenging paths.