Guild Wars 2

hallo
here my 2 minutes cry

Its maybe only me since i am a 1 man Guild and dont join fix teams since my work life dont allow me certain times

I love this game its great

But these days and many more often i ask myself why should i get the best gear or the optimum build for pve or wvw
its nice when im solo mobs die faster or in wvw when i solo roam

But dunguon or zerg wise?

what can i get by playing good…
I just wish the game would reward good play and encourage that.

ok im done thanks for reading i feel better

Achievement chests? Especially the 10K one is pretty neat.

A lot of issues around rewards I’d say relates to RND. But the game does become rewarding given enough time and effort, it’s just that over the short term you’d probably not feel all that rewarded. Probably something ANet can look at.

Kuess.1842:

Achievement chests? Especially the 10K one is pretty neat.

You’re kidding right? You probably spent the better part of the 2 years to reach that level but some of us have things to do IRL, it shouldn’t take 10-12 hour days to get a reward in any game.

It’s true they do need a new rewards system and I’m waiting on their CDI for the list of things I came up with.

The problem I find is bosses and the loot they give it is playing pachinko you only get crap and with a 0.66% chance you can maybe get a nice thing. That sucks, sucks really bad. In GW1 I know it was hard to get a voltaic spear and many would farm for it. But at least you always got some decent stuff after dungeon running. In Gw2 you get a rare maybe that’s worth nothing.

There is nothing hard to do besides fractals. And in Fractals it’s nice when you get an ascended ring or such but you know you worked hard for it. In gw2 there’s not a lot to work hard for other then grinding materials etc.

Everything that would motivate over a long term is either temporary or cashshopdriven. No wonder it feels unrewarding.

At the rate I am going after almost two years it will take me about ten more years to get a legendary if the price of an incinerator is around 3000g.

While many can say getting a legendary is a luxury, it is a time consuming and pointless chore for something so lacking. The legendaries essentially are just skins because with ascended weapons you can get the same stats with far less time, gold and effort involved. RNG and bad drops is a commonplace in MMOs so that’s no surprise GW2 is that way. When GW2 was new it was far more rewarding until Anet continued nerfing rewards.

The amount of time needed to be spent to obtain a lot of gold is just insane. On other MMOs there are high value items and lots of them to go after from bosses and other areas. On GW2, far too often, people just follow the zerg, champ after champ, world boss after world boss, hoping for that one good drop, hoping for that precursor.

There are just not that many high priced or high value items to go after so making a lot of gold is a slow road for most people. Get an exotic drop, to to sell on TP, oh it only sells for 1 or 2g. Well that’s somewhat useless given that there are many ways to make more gold and faster but farming of any kind gets simply boring if it has to be repeated over and over to add up to be worth something.

There are a couple of reasons that in my opinion GW2 doesn’t feel rewarding at all and there are a couple of reasons for that:

Loot distribution
Guild Wars 2 is a game that punishes friends/guildies playing together on many levels, I’ve posted this concern when Fractals were first released back in November 2012 but it is something still relevant, and gets worse if you add things like Ascended weapon/armor drops.

In “other” games, parties can distribute their loot drops as they see fit, either because no loot is Soulbound, OR there is a system that allows party members to pass Soulbound gear around, as long as they are in the same party. This “ability” to move loot around, away of RNG, is essential in raiding for example, when there are lots of people, but bosses drop a finite amount of loot on every run.

Leaders are meant to pass the loot around in a fair way, so after a few runs everyone gets their loot, instead of basing everything on pure RNG. That way, players feel that the rewards are better, even if they DON’T get that good item, at least they are certain that their “time” is now getting closer, meaning you are always progressing.

On the other hand, in Guild Wars 2, a player might run Fractals 1000 times and not get that Fractal Dagger skin, while another player gets 2 on his first 2 runs (pure RNG) this is beyond horrible if you imagine that player2 might not even want the dagger, while player1 was running fractals for the sole purpose of getting that fractal skin. Then add that those 2 players are playing together… Getting those drops is a serious insult to both players.

A way to mitigate the problem is by making account-bound and soulbound loot rewards partybound as long as the party exists, so members of the party can move the gear freely among themselves, gear that serves absolutely no other purpose than taking inventory space, since it can’t be sold (the 2s for ascended items is a joke) and can’t be salvaged. I see no penalty in moving that kind of gear around freely, only benefits.

The same could be applied to parties getting Ascended drops in Tequatl or Great Jungle Wurm fights, or even everywhere while in a party.

Punishing players over Rewarding them
This is a bit harder to explain, because it is affecting most MMORPGs out there to some extend, it’s just that some go to great lengths to hide it properly.

Imagine two scoring systems:

1) You start with 100 points and everytime you fail to do something you subtract 2 points
2) You start with 0 points and everytime you succeed in doing something you add 2 points

Although the two systems might offer up similar results in the long run, the second system will be recieved better, because it’s based on rewards instead of punishment.

Players dislike getting punished, aside from some weird individuals, it’s a common fact that human beings dislike getting punished. Yet, our loot system is designed to punish players instead of rewarding them.

You can’t do a dungeon path over and over, you can’t farm/grind those mobs for hours, the game has mechanics that prevent farming/grinding, and punish players when they do (by reducing their rewards)

As an example, imagine Citadel of Flame. Make a run of any path reward less tokens than it does now, then add a substantial boost if you do 2 paths, and an even higher boost if you do all 3 paths. Example: instead of 1/3 60 -> 2/3 120 (60) -> 3/3 180 (60) , you would get 1/3 40 -> 2/3 120 (80) -> 3/3 240 (160) if you do all 3 paths (that’s like doubling the amount of tokens for each unique path, and starting with 40 instead of 60). In a sense, similar to how the Domain of Anguish rewards worked in Guild Wars 1, the more parts you did in one run, the more varied tokens you got, but if you farmed only one part of DoA you got a far lesser amount of tokens.

Then remove the farming penalty, you can farm one dungeon path for reduced token overall, or be rewarded a lot more by doing the whole experience. Similar systems could be used in farming in the open world, instead of punishing a player when he is farming only Young Karka for hours, reward him for mixing Wind Riders, Reef Skelk, Reef Drakes and the Karka Queen in between killing those Young Karka. The “end” result doesn’t even have to be vastly different, it’s how it feels that counts.

Lack of REAL long term rewards
Getting that skin you like that requires an insane amount of gold, or crafting a legendary that takes an insane amount of grind does NOT quality for good long term reward in my case, I’d call them long term grind/farm instead.

Taking a system from Guild Wars 1 that could easily work well in Guild Wars 2 as well, is the concept of “Books”.

Imagine a Dungeon Master Guide book, that is filled when you do a dungeon path (including Story Modes) and when you fill the entire book, you can turn it in for rewards. In other words, a repeatable Dungeon Master achievement, that offers great rewards in the end.

Would you consider it a grind if you had to repeat ALL paths in the game for something? Sure you will be repeating something, but not something that takes a few minutes or just a few hours, but might take a regular groups hours and hours to complete. Is it a grind? I think not.

Similarly, a similar system for Jumping Puzzles, that requires players to do ALL of them, including Aetherblade, Obsidian Sanctum, Goemm’s Lab and Skipping Stones. For this to work, you’d need to add flags at the start, like in Guild Rushes, so players can’t park characters near the end to get the rewards.

Suddenly JPs and Dungeons become more important AND they get some long-term rewards, not to mention it will allow new players or players who haven’t done some dungeons, to do them now, because all paths have some extra meaning, that doesn’t include farming/speedrunning them only.

tl;dr
1) Game suffers from serious Loot distribution issues
2) Instead of punishing players for repeating activities, reward them if they are not
3) Add some more realistic long(er) term rewards