Guild Wars 2

tl;dr: What I’d prefer is for the Devs to stop punishing repetition and instead reward doing a variety of activities. Just like your rewards are becoming less and less when you do the same thing over and over, they could become more and more, the more variable things you do.

The issue of “rewards” is a topic that comes up often on these forums, because the reward system is messed up. First, the obvious: All activities in the game are competiting against one another for the most valuable resource: player time, if one activity is not rewarding enough then it will become a dead zone, since players won’t run the activity.

Dungeons:
We all know that dungeon paths have varied degrees of difficulty, and of course take a variable time to complete. Yet, they offer the same token reward, someone might argue that it’s because they give different skins or are used in different legendaries, but I’m not too sure that’s good reason enough for such extreme differences in effort needed.

Open World:
Champions are useless, killing 10 effortless mobs in 1-2 min will net you greater reward than killing a hard champion in 5-6 min, there is a reason players complain when Anet adds champions in events, like in Penit-Shelter events. Hint: it’s not because those champs are significantly harder than having the loads of mobs, it’s because Champs mean less loot, which obviously doesn’t make any sense.

World Bosses:
Bosses have different time requirements, Temple of Grenth/Lyssa require significantly more than the Fire Elemental and the Shadow Behemoth, yet they both reward the same free rare. The devs tried to change this with the Karka Queen, making her reward 2 rares, that’s 100% more reward than the other bosses! See how it worked out, Southsun is a dead zone so 2 rares simply isn’t enough for the trouble of killing her.

The list goes on, there is clearly a problem with the reward system. In an attempt to “fix” this and force players to move around the world the game uses a punishment system.

If you farm for favorite spot for a while, you get hit by DR. If you do a dungeon path more than once, you start getting less tokens. World bosses reward you only once per day etc. This was supposed to make players spread around the world, but instead, when they hit the “barrier” they logout.

One way to solve the reward problem is to reward players based on effort. Activities that require more effort, or are more challenging, could have better/more rewards. I agree with this, and can’t see anyone disagreeing either, but here is a problem with this approach: how much higher should the rewards be for the “harder” activities? If the Karka Queen showed us something, is that 2 Rares for a significantly harder/time consuming boss aren’t enough, then how many are enough?

Now imagine two dungeon groups, group 1 does CoF P1 in 5 minutes and Arah P4 in 40 minutes, on the other hand, group 2 does CoF P1 in 6 minutes and Arah P4 in 2 hours. Which of the two groups should we take as our base for the reward system? More rewards for harder content is good, but how high should that “more” be?

Other than increasing the rewards, something else could be used to motivate players to do more. Increasing rewards, the more unique activities you perform. My “inspiration” is the Domain of Anguish in Guild Wars 1. How could it work:

Dungeons:
When you run one path you get rewarded 60 tokens, like you do now. If you run a second path (different) you get bonus tokens and as you do more runs, the amount of tokens is increasing. The maximum number of paths in the game is 4 (Arah), so 4 is a great number to have as the maximum. Mixing dungeons could be possible, example:

Run SE P1 (60 SE Tokens), Run CoF P1 (60+60=120 CoF Tokens), Run SE P3 (60+60+60=180 SE Tokens), Run Arah P4 (60+60+60+60=240 Tokens)

Numbers aren’t “final” in any way, just an example of how a reward system could work.

That way, players could run the “faster/easier” paths to charge up the harder ones for the tokens they need for a legendary or armor skins. Lots of paths would become viable, instead of running the same path over and over.

In addition, making Dungeon Master achievement repeatable is also another way of promoting Dungeon variety. Players who finish all dungeon paths of all dungeons could get a great reward for their trouble, I was thinking something like the November Ancient Karka chest (maybe something more) Of course Story Mode should be included.

part 2:
Similar system could be used for the Jumping Puzzles. As it is now (and a Dev said as well) the main issue in increasing the rewards of JP chests is the probability of camping, leaving characters at the reward chests and log them every day to get loot. However this is easily fixed, while also making all of the viable:
Players doing all of them, everything in the Jumping Puzzle category, could get a reward from the Tyrian Cartographers Society, a BIG reward.

Suddenly, players will have extra long-term GOALs and the dungeons/JPs will be reviatilised, without actually changing their content. Maybe also make those once per month to prevent over-farming, although I doubt many players would farm either all the JPs or all Dungeons.

World Bosses/Events:
The Event system is core in the game, let’s promote it and make it more rewarding. Everytime players complete UNIQUE (once per day) events in a region (not zone), for example events in Kryta, Ascalon, Orr, not specific zones, they get a stackable buff (like Bloodlust/Luck etc) this buff will increase Gold/Karma/experience gain (maybe MF too?) but the most important bonus would be a MF boost on the final boss Chests, there is no other way to influence those, player MF doesn’t affect them, but giving extra rewards to those who move around the region doing events, compared to those who read the timers and just port there for the free rare, is important. The buff would disappear if you change Regions and you have to start again.

This would make zones with little activity, for example Lornar’s Pass, more important. To promote this, a Region chat could be implemented, allowing players all over an entire region to communicate and coordinate for events.

The reward system definitely needs to be revisited….and Anet said they are looking at doing just that.

I don’t know what they’re considering, but they could do worse than to consider the suggestions above.

Good job.

I think they should scale content rewards based on how long the average run takes and how often players complete that run. For example (made up stats ahead!):

An average Dun1 run takes 10 minutes and is completed 500 times a day. Completing it gives you n tokens.
An average Dun2 run takes 10 minutes, but is kittening hard, so it’s only completed 20 times a day. It gives you n*5 tokens.
An average Dun3 run takes two hours AND is kittening hard. It’s completed once a day and gives you n*20 tokens.
An average Dun4 run takes two hours, but is pretty easy and completed 200 times a day. It gives you n*15 tokens.

It’s a bit like the mob XP system: when you kill a mob that’s rarely killed, you get more XP. Except this time, completing dungeons that no one completes would give better rewards. It would encourage capable people to run the hardest dungeons and not just different dungeons. Of course, the base number (n) has to be reasonably high, such as 30 tokens. That way, even completing the current “meta” paths would give you a reasonable reward.

That sounds very “exploitable” though, it’s one of the reasons the actual effort-based reward system wouldn’t work properly.

What I’m proposing is a system that rewards variety, instead of repetition