Proposal Overview
Each piece of content, such as the Silverwastes “WvW” style of events, should be designed to create competition among the players while encouraging the need to help each other, which I call Comp-Cooperative (the need to help each other achieve the same goal yet are against each other).
Goal of Proposal
To make content last much longer and help alleviate the need to satisfy players due to short term projects such as “newest farming map” using a design philosophy. Too much content today is currently participation and only participation based. Me, sitting there letting my auto-attack gets me the same as me going all out in certain events and it gets old very fast.
Associated Risks
-With said competition in mind, players may complain that certain builds or items may give an unfair advantage. This will inevitably happen, with anything. Thus, said competition should be party based and not by an individual. With future content in mind, this would widen the variety of builds for PvE as high-DPS builds are dominant in the dungeon aspect of GW2 in terms of party composition.
-How the competition is created. This could be alleviated by having multiple ways of doing something, and if too much people are doing it a single way, it actually hurts them.
Rewards must undoubtedly be much better if you are doing better than others, and this will push away many players. What rewards can you give that will make this better to do than normal farming, and will it be worth it if you keep doing below average? How will it be tracked?
Secondary Goal of Proposal
A new mode of progression in PvE which is both Horizontal and Vertical. It remains basically horizontal because of the current systems (most people have exotic/ascended gear, not too wide of a gap), but will become vertical in the newer content and essentially “reset” as time goes on.
Secondary Proposal Overview
This would be done similar to how fractal “level” is determined: naturally, one would find it almost impossible to do a level 50 fractal with only 10 Agony Resistance. The newer content could have a similar system, utilizing buffs instead of actual items. These buffs are upgraded by the player individually to give them a better time in the newer content, and thus perform better than other players as it will be a competitive PvE environment. The amount of players who cap out on this buff would saturate over time, at which the dev team would already be done creating the next new content.
Associated Risks
-The question of “gating” comes to mind with such a system. Why would you prevent players from accessing content simply because they haven’t “geared up” for it yet? This could be worked around by simply letting players do more and survive longer in events if the player has worked on said buff.
-Elitism in parties and anti-solo. This works both ways. With a great group, you could achieve more. But solo also works, since you won’t be held back unintentionally. Elitism in parties, which favor only highly “buffed” players or “experience”, do exist in dungeon parties today yet don’t really kill the community on that aspect, but its still a risk.