Guild Wars 2

Last September, when the game had first launched, there was a rush of people throughout all of Tyria and the open world felt as if it were truly alive, with people interacting with all manner of events, exploring all corners of the open world (or grabbing POIs and running onwards to the next point for map completion.) The current open world however is much more empty, with the occasional new player, people playing with alt. characters and legendary item makers or people that sell the gift of mastery. (Yes I know it’s account bound, but a group of people that trust each other could still make large amounts of money with this.) Simply, the current open world is near “dead” compared to September of last year. A possible solution to this could be to increase the monetary rewards of completing a map say, 3 gold. (Which is understandable given the time investment of completing certain maps. I’m looking at you Lornar’s Pass.)

Increased monetary gain for open world explorers could encourage a portion of the population to explore the world on alt characters giving the further benefit of allowing newer players to experience the open world as it was last year as well as the possibility of increasing gem sales for character slots.

Possible issues with this would be of spreading the population thin where there are already relatively lower numbers compared to last September.

While guild missions and living story do attempt to move people back to the open world, as can be seen from The Secret of Southsun it is often not this simple, and retaining people in the open world is often more difficult than getting them there in the first place.

TL;dr
-Increase rewards for fully exploring a map, for example 1-3 gold per map depending on map level/whether it is a town/etc.
-This could potentially boost gem sales as well as allow new players to experience a truly, living, lively world and possibly increase player retention.

I don’t know if this solution would be best, since there would be a backlash of folks who have leveled all 8 char types to 80 and have done map completion several times over. However, and this has been mentioned in several other posts concerning less populated areas, the revamp of existing events and/or addition of other events (with worthwhile lootz — has to have the lootz), that satisfied the majority of the effort vs. reward principle COULD entice some players into those zones they don’t tend to frequent.

But I think what would be equally beneficial would be for those revamped/added events to be chains that affected more than just a single corner of the map, because otherwise you’ll have a ton of folks camped out in one secluded section waiting for the event to spawn, and then WPing out the moment it’s done.