Guild Wars 2

One of the few things I truly enjoyed about Dry Top was the Geode system. It is far from flawless, however, such as it not being a Wallet item (forcing an awkward handling of the geodes across multiple characters with the item limited to a single zone’s use, despite having had this very same issue with dungeon tokens in the past), it coming in a pop-up chest (making you stop for a couple seconds with every event you do, though understandable due to the silky sands), and the tier merchant system (great for returning content, though still needing improvements, and great for new content too, but for older content it would need to be easier to get to higher tiers no doubt).

I think that this system – giving a token that can be turned into for unique items for completion of events – can and should be extended elsewhere. There are many times – both presently and historically – where people find failing an event to be more profitable than succeeding an event. Sometimes this can cause griefing, sometimes not. Often, this is due to the failing leads to better champion farming from my experiences. Either way, the rewards for succeeding an event are rather “meh” to look at, and with the coming feature batch update improving other “meh” rewards, I think event rewards should be looked at too.

My idea is to impliment a series of tokens – all going directly into the wallet – that is rewarded upon the successful completion of an event. These tokens can be turned in to a merchant (or series of merchants) for items, both generic and unique. I would implement the system to include – with current zones – seven kinds of tokens, each with a merchant in the major cities and Fort Trinity. Each token would be restricted to a specific zone, with the exception of Kryta and the Maguuma Jungle which gets two tokens – which differ based on zone.

• Divinity’s Reach Token: Queensdale, Kessex Hills, and Harathi Hinterlands.
• Lion’s Arch Token: Gendarran Fields, Bloodtide Coast, and Southsun Cove.
• Rata Sum Token: Metrica Province and Brisban Wildlands.
• The Grove Token: Caledon Forest, Sparkly Fen, and Mount Maelstrom.
• Hoelbrak Token: All Shiverpeak Mountain zones.
• Black Citadel Token: All Ascalon zones.
• Fort Trinity Token: All Orr zones.

These tokens could be turned in for a series of things, for example, let’s say 250 Fort Trinity Tokens can be turned in for a single Pact Victory Token, allowing you to get a Pact Weapon from the Caer Aval instance. In the distant future, these merchants collecting event tokens can be used to buy recipes for new crafting items – be it new fancy backpacks, or precursors.

The main point of this, however, remains to be a “increase incentive to succeed events”, as aside from the daily event achievement, is there truly a reason to succeed over failing? The difference in rewards currently is questionable at best.

I believe the the geode system is a test bed for future systems of map events and rewards. The new patch coming up may make geodes a wallet item and perhaps include a number of new map event chains

Sounds good, actually. At the moment some people seem a bit too happy to nerf rewards from failed events, but people would generally respond better if rewards for succeeding events was increased instead.

The scaling works well too and encourages map wide coordination to succeed as much as impossible. The implementation of buried treasure to replace champions or at least partly replace them discourages zerging and rewards spread out play

Hayashi.3416:

Sounds good, actually. At the moment some people seem a bit too happy to nerf rewards from failed events, but people would generally respond better if rewards for succeeding events was increased instead.

Indeed, the idea is effectively the same – make succeeding events more worthwhile than failing events – but the idea is to buff successes, which are to me already negligible except when it results in good farms (lots of lootable mobs, or champion(s)), rather than nerf failures.

The Geode system feels like a good start, but still needs ironing out. Which is what I hoped I presented – the ironings out.

Azrael.4960:

The scaling works well too and encourages map wide coordination to succeed as much as impossible.

I presume you mean “as much as possible.”

It works well, indeed, except in the long term. Already, I’ve noted that tiers are averaging lower and lower as time goes on, and this will no doubt continue – with improved force – once we’re starting to get new content again.

As I said in my opening post, it seems to work best for new and annual content. This is more a system to be implemented – with some alterations – to Mad King’s Labyrinthe or Crown Pavilion (and not in the Boss Blitz format either) or to any future versions of Tower of Nightmares zone, rather than to be adding to the open world zones that never disappear.

For example, with the Crown Pavilion in future returns, it can feature a series of events – mini-bosses (champions) or culling-of-numbers (akin to the non-boss events from the first release of CP) – and take those successes to increase a tiering system, and at the :50 mark the six bosses are spawned with the rewards for completing that being based on the tier, rather than how fast the bosses are killed. Gauntlet successes could attribute to the tier progression, the amount depending on the Gauntlet tier – thus everyone is contributing.

Or with Mad King’s Labyrinthe could include events of assisting either Thorn’s side or Edrick’s side, and features a dual tier system, and the higher the “favor” of each side, the stronger the other side gets resulting in champions and legendaries. Think of it akin to the GW1 Wintersday finale, but rather than standing on rings with candy cane shards in the inventory, you raise the favor by slaying the enemies’ forces and completing events.

Since these things would be limited time, folks would flock to the content, thus presenting enough playerbase to effect the tier system properly. New content works just as well, but over time hitting those higher tiers becomes harder and harder as players go elsewhere.

The wallet is helpful at managing multiple currencies at once but I do hope that geodes aren’t exclusively used for dry top. If every future content/area release used some sort of unique currency then we’d have people looking back on this as a problem—even with the currency being added to the wallet.

Also, Konig, doesn’t the idea of a currency reward upon successful completion of an event sound similar to karma? Though karma gets rewarded even on failure, I think the concept of karma was the original idea but wasn’t implemented well enough.

Currently, events reward gold, experience, and karma for events – both success and failure. Theoretically, one can boost the success rewards of those three, but keep in mind that overall karma rewards were reduced, so wouldn’t it just be counter-productive to raise them once more?

The idea I had was more for regional-specific events, rather than events-in-general. Furthermore, the current event rewards are overall… unobvious. You don’t really see a tangible number because for all three the numbers are so huge and gained in so many ways – especially gold for the latter – that it doesn’t really feel like a reward.

Furthermore, excluding cultural weapons there’s really no long-lasting useful item to buy with karma. Sure, you have your heart items, a few event consumables that give you environmental weapons or a buff… but rarely do you find fancy unique skins (there being only three such sets: beaded, modniir, and godskull weapons), and nothing that really says “this is a reward for doing events in these maps”.

Ideally, with my idea, geodes would serve to be a “Maguuma Wastes token” and used in following zones heading west, rather than being restricted to Dry Top. My suggestion merely extends it to pre-existing zones.

Quite some time ago I suggested having a regional currency for each area, with it being a part of the reward on completing dynamic events. I still think it’s a good idea and would still like to see it implemented.

However, I don’t think it’s a good idea to add in the second part, where the whole zone has to work together to build favor to unlock new things at a merchant. It might be better to have one or two “hidden” merchants that only show up if you complete a long chain of events or meet certain conditions. These merchants can sell a few extra things or have reduced prices, but at least one of them can’t be hidden behind group events. You should never NEED the help of the rest of the zone to get what you want, they just might be able to help you to get it faster.

I am a HUGE advocate for map-exclusive skins. I do not think that an exclusive currency (geodes) was the proper way to go about it, as to have such a currency for every map would quickly make the whole system convoluted and inconvenient.

I do, however, feel like exclusive rewards attached to dynamic events, mob drops, and hidden chests would be a huge improvement.

Hiya Konig, not sure if all the people will come in this thread to repost their opinions, but this idea came up ‘extensively’ in this thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Revitalize-the-Game-World-Resetting-Hearts/first

It may be interesting for you to go through it and perhaps pick up on some details, concerns or otherwise suggested alterations or additions to a system as this.

While it felt like a bit of a derailing topic in the confines of the tread I linked, seeing that the spirit of the idea had the same aim, aka. revitalizing existing content, I never deemed it as such within said thread. I am glad you made a thread about this, as I think it actually disserves a topic on it’s own, as it seems like a valid and achievable way to make these zones more interesting to revisit, even at lvl80, and as such make it a way to provide more ‘end-game’ content.

What it would need though, at the base, to make it a worth while addition, is a rebalancing of the scale down feature so that the content will be enjoyable at these higher levels. I think I will make a thread about that now…
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Rebalancing-the-Scale-down-Feature/first#post4353501

what people might forget here (just for the record): we discussed this already in the horizontal progression CDI and It really seems like DryTop’s system is the product of that discussion.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

what people might forget here (just for the record): we discussed this already in the horizontal progression CDI and It really seems like DryTop’s system is the product of that discussion.

The need for the map to work together to get the best rewards makes the system a bit too aggressive for my tastes. As Dry Top becomes old news, we’re starting to see more of the down sides to it.

It’s a good implementation of the idea, but it still needs refinement.

Palador.2170:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

what people might forget here (just for the record): we discussed this already in the horizontal progression CDI and It really seems like DryTop’s system is the product of that discussion.

The need for the map to work together to get the best rewards makes the system a bit too aggressive for my tastes. As Dry Top becomes old news, we’re starting to see more of the down sides to it.

It’s a good implementation of the idea, but it still needs refinement.

we were rather discussing zone-specific rewards and progression, can’t remember the idea to work together in order to make rewards cheaper. I like that though, it’s like the whole zone is a meta-event.

Duke Blackrose.4981:

I do not think that an exclusive currency (geodes) was the proper way to go about it, as to have such a currency for every map would quickly make the whole system convoluted and inconvenient.

I thought similar, thus I thought “regional specific currencies” rather than map specific. Thus Geodes would become Maguuma Wastes, not just Dry Top.

The issue I hit was that I wanted to tie in major outposts/settlements as the place you’d go to turn these tokens in, thus we have 2 capitals in the Maguuma… neither having a strong tie to Sparkfly Fen or Mount Maelstrom, and we have 2 in Kryta (DR and LA). I found it hard to properly split.

Ideally, though, it’d be a 1 currency per region. There’s currently 6 regions, thus 6 currencies. As we go into the Crystal Desert, Far Shiverpeaks, or elsewhere, we’d gain more currencies – and more skins and other rewards to turn them in for. But even if we end up with 50 maps/zones, we’d still only have about 10 currencies. Not so very convoluted, I’d hope.

Arghore.8340:

Hiya Konig, not sure if all the people will come in this thread to repost their opinions, but this idea came up ‘extensively’ in this thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Revitalize-the-Game-World-Resetting-Hearts/first

I’ll give a look through. I really think a lot of the old game mechanics need a new look at them, but ArenaNet tends to ignore old content so long as major exploits and blocking bugs do not occur.

Which is a kitten shame.

Arghore.8340:

What it would need though, at the base, to make it a worth while addition, is a rebalancing of the scale down feature so that the content will be enjoyable at these higher levels. I think I will make a thread about that now…
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Rebalancing-the-Scale-down-Feature/first#post4353501

Yet another of the many issues the game has. I’ll look through that later, too.

absolutely agree with you. The dry top system was something I liked alot. It gives you something to gather from multiple enemies (the dust) to find geodes from so you can farm all you want to without having to worry about DR, then you turn those geodes in for keys, and wait for the storms to come to reveal boxes. I liked this system so much I asked them to make it the entire world of Tyria because it eliminates the ability of bots to auto-gather, it makes people finish events, and it keeps the players who like to farm, like me, in the game.

If they made this system part of their rewards revamp I would personally welcome it with open arms. It’s been a long time coming.

I’d hope however that long with your suggestions, they’d make it so that materials needed for legendaries and for crafting sigils/runes would be directly available from vendors so they can eliminate some of that RNG they have going. It would make it easier for people to change their builds if they removed this obstacle and tokens would be a great way of doing just that.

IF they kept the key system I’d hope they would re-scatter the chests in Tyria and make them locked requiring these keys, which would mean no more greens and blues from chests you find!

Another thing they could do is eliminate the surplus of these Tier 7 materials by making them turn ins for items like the Tier 6 materials.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

what people might forget here (just for the record): we discussed this already in the horizontal progression CDI and It really seems like DryTop’s system is the product of that discussion.

While I can see what you mean, and can agree with you in regards to DryTop (though how it will develop remains to be seen… In the general spirit of this discussion I have to agree with Konig.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Arghore.8340:

Hiya Konig, not sure if all the people will come in this thread to repost their opinions, but this idea came up ‘extensively’ in this thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Revitalize-the-Game-World-Resetting-Hearts/first

I’ll give a look through. I really think a lot of the old game mechanics need a new look at them, but ArenaNet tends to ignore old content so long as major exploits and blocking bugs do not occur.

Which is a kitten shame.

Arghore.8340:

What it would need though, at the base, to make it a worth while addition, is a rebalancing of the scale down feature so that the content will be enjoyable at these higher levels. I think I will make a thread about that now…
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Rebalancing-the-Scale-down-Feature/first#post4353501

Yet another of the many issues the game has. I’ll look through that later, too.

So this isn’t so much about new content, as it is about introducing ‘horizontal progression’ in maps that are already in the game. Like I said in the ‘Rebalancing thread’; When this game was 2 or 3 months old, the first ‘where is end-game’ threads started to come up, and almost the whole forum jumped up to say ‘The whole game is end-game’…

Unfortunately now that we are 2y onwards, we have to conclude that the way the game progressed, makes this statement entirely invalid. Power-creep, balance changes and player learning has made almost all content trivial. Both inflation as well as the new reward structures have made most of the game unrewarding.

And while we discussed this in the horizontal/vertical progression CDI, doesn’t mean that it’s invalid to bring it back up in a more specific and detailed thread. If anything it shows that this is still a major concern for multiple players, and that it has yet to be addressed. ( also, but with a bit of a ‘lol’ connected to it: "I doubt there be many threads that are entirely new, on a forum that is 2y old, even the CDI’s are usually just a rehash of what’s already been discussed and said in many other threads before it )

@Konig , yeah I agree with you on that one, unfortunately , but I refuse to give up hope, as when I do that I might as well quit :/ … Do check, there were some ideas with dungeon tokens too, which I think may well complement a system with a regional reward token, perhaps a 2 to 1 exchange ‘both ways’, would be interesting as a way to make it multi-dimensional in player approach.

The other thread basically connects with this thread on the level where, if you were to put a regional reward system in place, that is geared more towards end level content. Then the content you do, should at least also somewhat feel like that. As opposed to grinding out low levels. This could then also have it’s reflection in the rewards given and the value attributed to the rewards…

I like the general idea, but I’m a bit weary of having so many different tokens in the game already. >.>

The geode system is very similar to what was discussed here several months ago:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/archive/suggestions/A-way-to-get-people-back-into-the-open-world

Maybe Anet had it planned all along without our suggestion, but great to see world tokens implemented. If this map last as an end game area in due time, maybe the system will be expanded to include existing maps.