Guild Wars 2

Hey, I’ve recently made a post, quoted below, about Champion Farming in general, how to cut it down and bring more people to whole game world. I thought these are nice ideas and I didn’t want to let it sink. Discuss

“Putting a daily chest limit for Champions would fix it period. Increase rewards per mini-chest, but you can only receive it once a day. Queensdale, Frostgorge Champion Trains stopped in one minute.
If people would like to get more Champion mini-chests, well, they’d have to visit other places, search for them and don’t rotate.
For people saying it would be an exctinction of world…erm…Those people don’t explore the world, they just rotate over and over, they’re just pure bots. Heck, I heard that they even run only pre-thought paths to get to the boss as quickly as possible. They count every step, every little detail..That’s kind of sick.
Also, adding one, one low RNG reward with some cool skin or minipet, or anything unique to each of Champions would bring totally new life to all areas in the game.
Another idea coming with that is very simple. For each jumping puzzle, dynamic event or sth like that done, you could have gain small boost to loot per champion. That boost could be daily boost or weekly. It’d further encourage masses of people to do events, explore dungeons, jumping puzzles, just to have increased loot for area. It can be even rewarding for “explorers” player type. Generate random buffs which can be obtained by random exploring.
There’s a lot of stuff that can be done to bring people back from LA to every single zone in the game. Those are really quick, simple things.

How that “increased loot system” would work? Well, kind of similar to Horde chain quests in Stonetalon Mountains currently. For those who haven’t played WoW, as you progress through quests, you get kind of a map title, progressing with chain quest. From dunno, sergant to general or something http://www.wowhead.com/spell=78054. Adding similar thing to GW2 system would be plainly amazing.
As you progress through the area, you start to receive Hero Points. After certain amount of points, you hop on another rank.
Rank names could vary from different areas. Examples:
-Slayer of the Branded?Vanquisher of the Branded?Cursed’s Bane
-Watchman of Orr?Gravedigger?Undeath’s Salvation

With each rank, total loot should be improved, chances for unique things, money and karma awarded from DEs, quality of things from karma vendors, vendors overall higher. But also mob scaling should be greater for the player. Just simple scaling like in DEs with damage, hp etc.
Now, these ranks could be for whole area (Shiverpeaks, Ascalon, Branded part, Maguuma) or for certain zones (Queensdale, Iron Marches, Caledon Forest) and they would reset every 24h or every week/month (one reset each week should be fine).

Unique items obtainable from Champions (affected hardly by rank), zones etc. , should be as I call them – Unique. It means that when some of them should be tradeable, most of cool stuff which can be used cross-characters (unique backpieces, fun stuff, minipets) has to be Account Bound!"

Precursor idea in my first response below

So, let’s say your suggestions are taken into consideration and applied by the devs, how many people would you expect to see back into the world map, doing other things, per server? I’ve done those trains and the zerg doing it it’s hardly composed of more than twenty players at any given moment.

While I like the idea of making other champions in other zones actually rewarding, I do not support any idea that takes something away from a game because a select few do not like it.

Leave champion trains, and improve rewards from unused zones to the point where people have a choice of following the train, or striking out to other areas for different rewards.

Reward disparity is the entire cause of Champ Trains. Make the rest of the game as rewarding, and they will disappear in time. Forcing them away is just another PR blunder for Anet, who is already in the doghouse with most of the MMO community lately after the Fractal debacle.

While I applaud the thought of making play in disparate areas more rewarding, I don’t believe that the game needs more time-gated tasks, nor more rewards with time-gated diminished returns. Ending Champion farms would not make players “spread out.”

OK the way I see it your idea isn’t bad. The thing is there really isn’t anything wrong with the champ train. Think about it a sec. The champ train was added after they nerfed dungeon rewards. The point was to get players back into the world. Players are not stupid though. They want loot and shinies to support what ever they are trying to buy. So they figured out the most efficient use of their time and wala you have champ train.

Your proposal basically says the champ train is bad. That is your opinion but lets look at the ramifications of your proposal.

Nerfing the champ train by reducing loot to once a day and using dynamic events to boost loot chance (like a chest magic find) to boost the loot from bosses in an area.
However. the bonuses aren’t permanent and require players to re explore the area on a weekly or daily basis. To boost loot from a champ (still rng) which is account bound in some cases and can not be sold for gold.

The main issue here is that you are trying to make each champ like and event chain in orr for a temple or a world boss. Much like when they nerfed the bosses and temples to once a day loot you will see less people trying to farm for higher loot rates and more people farming the bosses and logging out or moving on to other things like dungeons. Fresh new skins based on rng that can’t be sold will boost the pop doing this for a moment. However, much like Teq is now only a few guilds will keep up with this foolishness as rng doesn’t provide the shiny you want time after time and it can’t be sold in the first place (see: this).

Your idea sadly would drive players out of the world. Making things this intensive for such small loot much like what happened to world bosses (many simply farming for a precursor) will just drive some player away.

Please do not forget the point of open world for most players is to earn cash to support their crafting of ascended gear, legendary weapons, line their pockets with gold, boost their magic find, and/or to support WvW.

Thanks all for responses!
I have few things to point out :
-I have nothing really against champion trains. I just don’t really approve the thing that we just run with massive zerg and spend time doing exactly same thing over and over. It isn’t fun, it isn’t any challange, it isn’t any risk. Yet it gives best money...
-By saying that most unique things such like minipets should be account bound I adress this to specific, veery large community of people in this game: collectors. I bet that if my system were implemented, they’d hunt for exclusive pets and still have fun exploring the map with a little bit raised difficulty. Sure, things with stats and some others such as weapons, armors etc. should be tradeable, because carrying useless stuff you can’t use is bad.
-If you leave unique things earnable by gold they’ll end up a legendaries - more common than masterwork items. Adding tokens to everything isn’t a solution either. It makes stuff timegated, people rush, rush for these tokens just to get stuff quickly and they then leave it forever.
Proper RNG isn’t bad. It keeps people playing the game, it’s always that excitement when you drop something good. With token system it’s just like "Ok, two more runs and I get that". Why do you think that Diablo 3 was such fail compared to Diablo 2? It had really cool story, smooth gameplay, nice classes. No. Because you were able to buy everything by gold and real money. Best geared players were best auctioneers or those who had tons of money irl not dedicated players. That’s why Blizzard closes Auction House in D3. I don’t call to close TP, hell no! Just reduce it’s importance and role in the game. Guess what? New Expansion for D3 will be totally based on RNG. And everyone likes that, nobody except of goldsellers complain.
If you have same chances of getting certain unique item as other player, I call this fair. If you have to grind endlessly and some player with a lot of gold can just buy it right from TP without any effort, it’s not fair.
-Champion Train isn’t the only way to earn gold. This change would not only shave prices a little bit, repairing economy from bot gold, but also encourage new ways of earning gold.
As I said, it’s not only champion rewards redesign. It influences whole areas and rewards. As you progress in rank, you get more karma, gold, better drops, more money from DEs. It could go well with repeatable heart quests, suggesten in another topic.
It’s also a change in vendors. Let’s say, previously some karma vendor was offering you packet of herbs. Nobody really wanted that. What if, after you get certain rank, he could offer you T6 mats for karma or tokens gathered from playing around certain area? Now we’d eliminate "TP only" from gathering your mats for Ascended things. Get your stuff by playing the game! Make karma actually worth and usable for something!
Champions could also have pieces of Legendary precursors. Obtainable by drops or tokens. You remember all those collector mobs in Guild Wars 1? With exchangeable good stuff for "trophies" they wanted? Bring it back! Precursors could be really obtainable in this way!

Why not even make a cool story/quest about every precursor? Let’s say you drop some small part of Dusk. When you click on it, you’re told to visit some NPC in the game who can tell you of possible places of other couple parts. With every NPC, you may get some cool story or tale about certain Champion/place where you gather your pieces. It’d bring so much to the game! Think of it!

There’s a lot of stuff to do with this system. It wouldn’t hurt the economy, I bet it’d bring more players into actual world and make precursor scavanger hunting nice journey! And still would be very profitable

You’re using the flawed assumption that people in the train would go to the open world if the trains are nerfed. What would happen its the same that happens today with the World Bosses “train”: get your chests, then go to LA/dung/WvW/LS/Fractal or logout. Also, as mentioned before, there are about 20-30 people at any given time in the train. That means that if we distribute evenly across Tyria you will see a grand total of about 1 char per open world map.

The main problem with map emptiness is that you can see Tyria only so many times before it becomes boring: There is no reason for me to go back to Metrica aftet I have finished 100% 1-2 times. The only solutions are to increase the flux of players (that will spend like 10 hours per map, top) or to make old areas interesting again.

Same for dungeons and fractals: Except for the very few that try to perfect their runs and are proud of their speed in clearing dungeons or their fractal level, there is no reason to run them more than one besides the armor. The exception being the easy ones like CoF that can be “farmed” for easy gold and ascended mats. Granted, there are also some that just like to run them, but they are a minority too.

That’s why the LS its a good idea: it gives new air to old areas. Agreed, the implementation may have its flaws, but the idea is sound. It was really fun being with people in Southsun doing things, with the zerg and outside it, and Scarlet Invasions used to be fun even with the blaming and QQ on the chat.

We need more of that, not less of what we have.