Guild Wars 2

The requirements for achievements like “Saving the City of Gold”, “Realm Avenger”, “Connoisseur of Confection”, “Koda’s Blessing” among others have to be reconsidered.
In a similar fashion, most master artisan, ascended and legendary gear recipes are so resource and time-gated that they turn people away from crafting rather than make it interesting.
Those shout out: “To get me, I want you to live in the game for months on end, drop school, leave your job, sell whatever you can, forget everybody you’ve ever known”.
This is a bad way to make people play in the long run.
Asking for a task to be repeated 250,000 times or huge amounts of an extremely rare resource to be acquired is just rude.
Like waving candy in front of a child’s face then taking it away while laughing maniacally.
IMHO, there are smarter ways to make people stay and play on a regular basis.
For starters, the solution for those achievements with the huge counters is simple – just reduce the numbers.
As for the those that ask players to acquire a lot of rare and expensive materials, here are several suggestions:

1) Make tier 6 resources more abundant (e.g. replace some Mithril Ore nodes with Orichalcum Ore nodes).
Why place so many mithril nodes in new 80+ zones when the material is in excess already?
At the same time orichalcum is so desperately needed and scarce even without the constant addition of more legendary weapon and armor recipes as well as rare collections.
Respectively, salvaging high-level equipment should yield 2-3 pieces of metal, leather, wood, orbs, globs etc. instead of a measly 1.

2) Change the mechanic of “play-GW2-for-5-years” collections altogether. Instead of asking for resources that cannot possibly be acquired in months, and that is for a single piece of equipment, try this:
Longer scavenger hunts that send players to multiple zones. Not necessarily involving new item icons and effects.
Use old code and art, just change item names and add more events that end quickly but spawn more often.
These hunts may even be tied to new expansions and Living World releases, i.e. one may not be able to complete the hunt right away because the last 3 pieces of the puzzle are in Cantha for instance.
Similar to what was done for the legendary armor collection.
This will give players something to do in between story, promote exploration and revisiting of old areas.
Such a hunt has a feel for natural progression to it, evolving alongside Tyria and the story of its characters.
Let’s make a quick comparison. On the one hand there is a collection/recipe that has nothing special and unique about it, just grind the same old resources in ever-increasing amounts.
On the other hand we have an activity that has a distinct sub-story and community-oriented mechanics (hello, we’re still playing a D&D-like MMO, not a pretty stock exchange UI, right?) – a real adventure.
It’s all about mentality really. With the scavenger hunt, you may not be able to do it on Xday because you have to go to school or work, your friends are not online or you’re just not in the mood.
On Yday however, you’re all free, well-rested and hungry for adventure. You go in and do part 5 out of 12 of the collection for the latest legendary sword.
In contrast, with some of the current achievements/collections, no matter how many mornings in row you get up, make a cup of coffee and brace yourself up, after you log in the counter will still be at 3,047/100,000.
More time and more friends to help don’t make things better because the counter ticks with one where you need thousands. Its depressing, discouraging and feels exactly the opposite of rewarding.
Back to my point about mentality – make people look forward to a long scavenger hunt with a couple of slightly different and marginally exciting new steps each month/quarter rather than the same old resource grind forever.

3) Reduce resource requirements for those recipes either by decreasing required amounts of finished goods (e.g. ingots) or required amounts of raw materials (e.g. 2 pieces of wood to produce 1 plank).
Although, I personally don’t understand the logic behind wood refinement. Always thought that a plank is made out of a single piece of wood, but hey I won’t get picky.
Let’s say that wood refinement has to be on par with ore refinement and shake hands on 2 pieces.
We’re not gathering splinters, right? At least it seems like we’re felling whole trees in the game engine. Those should be long enough for a single plank at the very least.
Otherwise, we’ll need a ton of glue and nails to put those splinters together. Not to mention that the rigidity of a weapon handle made out of splinters is dubious.
Anyway, having to gather 360 instead of 480 logs for a single weapon sounds somewhat more reasonable, eh?

4) As a continuation of point 3 above – swap multitudes of ordinary materials in ascended and legendary recipes with single pieces of ascended and legendary materials.
I’m not saying that we have to chase realism fanatically in a fantasy RPG but there are certain advantages in simulating realism too. Let me elaborate.
How about adding a handful of special trees/ore nodes at the end of jumping puzzles which yield a single log of wood/chunk of ore for an ascended recipe which in turn requires a single plank/ingot of that same special wood/metal?
Or maybe the recipe requires one plank/ingot of several types of special woods/ores, and a single tree/ore node for each of those exists somewhere.
Does not even have to be a JP. Any place in Tyria that is hard to reach and requires jumping skills or thorough exploration will make things more interesting.
May also be at the end of a dungeon path or in a chest at the top of a tower in WvW.
Again, difficulty is not in the number of pieces required. It is offset by the difficulty and, more importantly, the diversity of the trip to the resource.
Similarly, the only way to obtain special leathers and pieces of cloth may be to kill a rare monster or a magus,
special gems may be scattered in chests all around the world, special plants taking root from the depths of the ocean to the ridges of the tallest mountains and so on and so forth.
Let’s work for those materials as part of a vivid journey, not a sleepless night at the Black Lion Trading Post with a calculator in hand and a spreadsheet open in the background.

Please share your thoughts and opinions.

Avanglion.3598:

In a similar fashion, most master artisan, ascended and legendary gear recipes are so resource and time-gated that they turn people away from crafting rather than make it interesting.
Those shout out: “To get me, I want you to live in the game for months on end, drop school, leave your job, sell whatever you can, forget everybody you’ve ever known”.
This is a bad way to make people play in the long run.

It’s a way of making money.

Avanglion.3598:

Asking for a task to be repeated 250,000 times or huge amounts of an extremely rare resource to be acquired is just rude.
Like waving candy in front of a child’s face then taking it away while laughing maniacally.
IMHO, there are smarter ways to make people stay and play on a regular basis.
For starters, the solution for those achievements with the huge counters is simple – just reduce the numbers.
As for the those…

Since HoT I believe more and more hardcore players started to emerge who demand more “difficulty” what game strategists translate incorrectly leading to absurd solutions, like feeding one guy 50 Apples to get a mastery point – ridiculously dull task. It reminds me much of Lineage 2 and other, very old MMOs. Not surprising since NCSoft runs the show here.

GW2 has lost its casual tag and to an ever growing extent became a grind. This is not the game we used to know / started to play. Nowadays it’s Fashion Wars + eSports w/ absurd class balancing.

Inoki.6048:

Since HoT I believe more and more hardcore players started to emerge who demand more “difficulty” what game strategists translate incorrectly leading to absurd solutions, like feeding one guy 50 Apples to get a mastery point – ridiculously dull task. It reminds me much of Lineage 2 and other, very old MMOs. Not surprising since NCSoft runs the show here.

You do know that achievement was intentionally put in to mock classic MMO fetch quests?

If the goal is to get people to play the game longer I think there are more interesting ways other than adding so much farming.

The goal of these is to give people long term goals to work towards and to make new content non trivial. If you can complete all of the achievements in a day then the content isn’t too memorable, and then people complain about a “lack of content” because they chose to go straight back to ABML.

I actually think most of these requirements are fine.

I do not like / support any of your suggestions. Would reduce the replayability of the game.