Alleviate the Grind -- Offer short-term rewards on the way to longer term ones
Posted by: Agent Noun.7350
I posted something similar to this on the suggestions forum, but this one gets a lot more traffic. I understand if this needs to be moved or deleted for being in the wrong place.
The problem. Right now, Guild Wars 2, as a PvE game, is too heavily skewed towards long-term rewards, and offers very few short-term rewards along the way. Many people have expressed that they don’t feel rewarded for doing dungeons or events—I think this is because the reward you receive is normally only in the form of currency (either tokens or karma). There’s little thrill in watching a stack of currency rise in small increments.
This is a similar problem to the one that Diablo III faced on launch and, to a degree, still faces. In Diablo III, players in Inferno mode quickly learned that the likelihood that an item that dropped would be useful to them was very slim. The goal of the game changed from the expected kill enemies to get items that will make me stronger to kill enemies to get items that I can sell to get currency with which to eventually buy items that will make me stronger. It’s not a subtle difference, and for many people it drained the fun out of the game in short order.
So what can be done to fix this in Guild Wars 2? I have a couple of suggestions.
First: offer meaningful rewards for the first time you complete all paths of an explorable mode dungeon. One solution would be to offer a single unique weapon when you complete that, similarly to how players received unique weapons upon completing a campaign in the first Guild Wars. It feels nice to be rewarded and works as encouragement to keep going and get more pieces of the armor set or other rewards.
Second: offer at least a chance for tangible rewards from each and every dungeon run. This could be as simple as offering a chance for explorable mode bosses to drop exotic equipment if a player is level 71-80. An end-of-dungeon achievement chest could offer a few rare crafting materials, an ecto or two, etc. What would be even better is if these rewards were dungeon-specific—if a player can know that, by running a dungeon, he or she has a chance to receive a specific exotic weapon that can only come from a certain dungeon or a certain boss, there’s an extra layer of motivation there beyond “accrue tokens.”
Finally: offer more meaningful loot from chests at the end of meta-event chains and large event bosses, especially in Orr and Frostgorge Sound, and at the end of platforming challenges.
Where can the content come from to fuel some of these rewards? I understand there’s work to do. Why not shift some of the currently Mystic Forge-only item skins towards dungeon and event rewards? There are quite a few weapons and armor sets that can only come from the Mystic Forge, as far as we know, including items like Glint’s Scale. What if many of these were instead offered as unique rewards that could drop in certain dungeons or from event bosses?
I really believe that players would be more motivated to run difficult dungeons—even many, many times over, as is required for dungeon armor sets—if they knew they had at least a chance to receive meaningful rewards in smaller doses along the way to the long-term goal.