Guild Wars 2

So after seeing a thread reach over 171 pages in under 24 hours of complaining about the idea of ever increasing gear treadmill (for lack of a better term). I have a question for people, while this doesn’t effect structured PvP at all and may only have a minor effect on WvWvW (Granted that infusions don’t give a massive buff), what would people like to see instead to keep PvE players playing through more then just monthly content updates?

In the end, what people are forgetting is Arena-net needs to find someway to keep people playing the PvE portion of the game and needs some incentive besides legendaries to keep people going. Deal is none of us want a treadmill and that is single handedly the most common and obvious way to do it. In the end it isn’t arena-net taking back one of the original design principles it’s arena-net adapting their game for a flaw that hits almost every game. The big question of “I got this, what now?”

So I am interested in peoples ideas in what they’d like to see, and maybe someone from arena-net might see one of these ideas and implement them or build off of them because offering an alternative is better then just complaining about one solution.

To begin, I think competitive PvE would be a good addition. In Factions/Nightfall there were little mini-missions in the game which could be used to farm materials, factions, and some odd tokens along with all sorts of other stuff. These missions had “Top Players/Guilds” scores. I think an improved system of this, small PvE competitions of people killing a bunch of monsters in 10 minutes, occasionally a boss, or capturing some point to extend the time. Would be great if they could find a way besides bragging rights to get people to play them.

Second I think a modified ‘Faction’ system as found in Factions would be another good addition, sadly with the lack of ‘cities your guild can buy’ the entire idea would need to be rethought of. To those who didn’t play, in Factions you could buy cities by trading in influence with either the Kurzicks or Luxons, which would plaster your guild/alliances face for all to see along with all sorts of other advantages such as ability to run a dungeon. I think if somehow guild achievements could be plastered for people to see and people actively PvEing gave people something to see/work for instead of gear we wouldn’t need such a treadmill.

You cannot just implement real competitive PVE/PVP in casual player base targeted game. There will be thousands of casuals who would want to be on par with non-casual players. And in case the will be able to – it will be definitely NOT competitive. Aside from that there are a lot well implemented ideas of progression without treadmill in other MMO games.