Guild Wars 2

I came up with a little idea about the downscaling after reading a few threads. I don’t want the downscaling itself to change in any way but I do see a point some are making.

If you are an 80 and helping out a friend in a low level area you are rewarded what you would be for doing an event if you were level 10 yourself. Those rewards are, of course, no where near what they are when you are doing level 80 events. This, naturally, leads people to not wanting to actually help.

My idea is to increase the rewards to between 50-75% of what your actual level would be rewarded. The reason I don’t feel they should match 100% is because even if you are downscaled you have an enormous advantage still. I can go down to the Human starting area to farm some cloth, round up 10-15 mobs, and AoE them down without dropping below 90% hp while a person that is actually closer to that level would suffer an almost instant death. Due to the lower difficulty level you shouldn’t get the full reward.

Naturally this would lead to more higher levels helping out lower level zones. I would love to go back and help kill that stupid Fire Elemental in the Asura starting zone, as I am sure many others would as well. I think it would actually be more in line with ANet’s philosophy if they did this as it would lead to a more active world and there wouldn’t be zerge groups running around the level 80 maps that then come and QQ on the forums about the “anti-farm” code.

Of course I am only talking about event completion rewards with this. A level 10 raptor should still drop the basic claws and not the 400 crafting version. I do believe this would help keep the world feeling healthy and alive as I get tired of hearing “Now you die” or being yanked by yet another anchor over and over again just to keep the rewards more in line with my level. I don’t want anything nerfed!

“Friends” who decide whether they want to help me based on the loot they will get aren’t friends at all. They just want me around when it’s convenient for them.

Fine as it is IMO.

I help lower level friends out all the time, but I would much rather be in a higher level zone. There is absolutely nothing wrong with increasing the rewards to be more in line with actual level instead of effective level. Again, they shouldn’t be identical because the difficulty isn’t anywhere near the same.

It would increase the chance of higher leveled players in the lower leveled zones. Regardless of how excellent some of the lower leveled zones are, the amount of players in those zones are going to continually decrease over time. There are only so many people who are going to buy the game or roll alts.

I am NOT comparing GW2 to any of the following games used in my next example. WoW has roughly 9 million players yet you hardly see people in the lower level zones or doing lower level content because there is no reason to do so. Now if you look at RIFT on the other hand, when you go to a lower level zone, or mentor down or whatever it’s called, or do the scenarios for the lower level zones, you get rewarded based on your actual level. This increased the number of players in all zones, or at least I believe that is how it works as I haven’t played in quite a while.

Will there always be people who go and help lower leveled friends? Of course. That happens in WoW and it happened in RIFT, even before they added the changes. The number of players, however, continues to decrease over the life of the game. My proposed idea would help tremendously in keeping the game world feeling alive for years to come.

While not all rewards are scaled to your level in lower areas, many are, especially those associated with group events and involving chests.

I would like to see a scaled up karma and copper reward. Not enough to take over high level content, but at least enough to justify the waypoint costs when going to help people.

Yeah, chests are generally scaled to your level, at least for boss events. That’s why you see loads of people fighting dragons. The event reward itself, karma/exp/gold, doesn’t scale though which is what I was aiming at tweaking. :-)

All the event completion rewards are scaled up if you are Level 80. I am pretty sure events in Level 1 areas don’t normally give a couple thousand XP and 200 Karma, as that would mean at least a couple of level ups from just one event.

I don’t get but roughly 1.5-2k exp per event. That is what I got when I was that level. I was getting around 5 levels per map by doing all of the events/hearts per map, sometimes more if I gathered a lot. Karma, sounds about right though, the copper reward though, not really all that much. I get 350-400 karma per event at 80, doing 80 events, 18-19k exp, and 1.5-2k silver. It’s a lot less when doing lower level zone events.

Pretty sure this is already happening regarding DE’s. Every dynamic event I’ve done so far in low-level areas (I’ve been spending the last few days working my way through the norn areas with my 80) has rewarded me with nearly as much karma, experience, and coin as a level 80 area.

I’ve also frequently gotten drops that are near or at my level (80), including rares. Not only this, but an increased rate of dye drops (Oh, btw, did you guys know that dye drops a lot more if the level you’re in is way lower than your character level?) adds an additional reason to play in these areas aside from the other motivations for doing so (map completion, DE’s, etc).

I guess TL;DR: They’re already doing this.

Weird, I don’t get nearly as much coin or exp and half the normal karma. And no, this isn’t the anit-farm code people are going on about.