Guild Wars 2

ozmaniandevil.6805:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

That gave me an idea, remember when I suggested getting dungeon tokens for events? You get 1-2 token for completing an event with a gold medal. I love the region wide idea… having a few zones where you get a specific token (like all ascalon zones to get AC token).

What if each region’s dungeon vendor would sell one specific crafting material (t6)? Let’s say Ascalon’s dungeon vendor sells Piles of Crystalline Dust (t6) for 3-6 dungeon tokens.

This way you could directly work on your Legendary without depending on t6-rng drops from laurel vendor bags or drops in general. Do you still need 30 vicious claws? Go to Maaguma zones and do events there. Or armored scales? Kryta it is then.

Now THIS I like. Great idea.

Thanks! I just found out that I missed something: do a dungeon and you would be able to buy tons of t6 mats… so some minor change should find it’s way in here:

• in the open world / events you don’t get whole tokens but only fragments of tokens (combine 2 to create a token). The T6 mats will be only purchaseable by fragments then.

Orpheal.8263:

This is a topic, which I think, deserves an own CDI, I’d name the topic:

Ways to improve the Game’s Longevity in PvE
Topics that I think could get discussed then in there are:

• Renowm Heart Improvements/ Reputation Systems
• Order Missions/ Order Guilds and Daily Task/Achievement Improvements
• Dynamic Event Rewards
• Map Exploration/ Spreading out Region Achievements
• PvE Replayability Personal/Living Story
• Guild Mission Improvements and General Guild Improvements
• Engame Content. i.E. explorable Elite-Locations, like the Underworld
  ect pp.

Way too generic of a CDI. Generic CDI’s too often have too many people talking about too many ideas for anyone to follow any of the subtopics. Especially if people post “Great Suggestion” or “Horrible Suggestion” but give no indication to which suggestion their post relates to.

Now, if the made a CDI subforum and made this session’s related to longevity and had ONE thread per bullet point, then I’d be game for it. But if they do the one thread for the entire CDI topic like they have in the past, a generic CDI topic won’t work.

Each of your bullet points is a better usage of an individual CDI if they use the format they’ve used in the past.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

• Some people would like to an option repeat hearts. Many people are opposed to being required to repeat hearts which is probably enough reason not to require it. In the future we ought to consider repeat rewards or even a prestige system for voluntarily replaying one-time content.

• Karma may be an underwhelming common event currency. Many people would like to see it applied towards a greater variety of personal reward goals such as crafting materials, more skins, etc. People seem favorable to region specific rewards, but at some point we have to reconcile the notion that it would probably further devaluate karma. I would also like to submit that karma has another issue which is that whenever you purchase something you are setting back your progress towards other purchases. Of course, that’s a fundamental aspect of currency and yet, it’s less intrinsically rewarding than gold because you can use gold to make more gold (gear upgrades, crafting, trading, etc). At the level 80 end especially, big karma sinks are largely cosmetic and will not help you earn more karma. Personally, I feel that effective reward systems regularly disperse rewards along the path to a longer term goal. (If you haven’t checked out PvP Reward Tracks, you should!)

If I am reading thee 2 paragraphs right, the first paragraph is the solution to the question of karma in the second. Personal reward goals of a specific region should be available using region specific items (tokens for instance). Region specific rewards should be based on region specific activity. Yes, you can do the same thing based on region prestige unlocking and then use karma to buy stuff, but having tokens (what essentially would amount to region specific karma would allow the purchases as well as reserving karma for other purchases.

Of course, I may just be reiterating exactly what you were trying to get across.

The hearts are some of the most uninteresting PvE content in the game. They’re the GW2 equivalent of “kill X of monster Y and return to me for a terrible reward” that most other MMOs use as a form of questing. I really can’t get behind the idea of resetting those and forcing people to redo them or any other type of PvE content every month. The game should be becoming more flexible for veteran and new players alike, not more restrictive.

Zedd.8239:

The hearts are some of the most uninteresting PvE content in the game. They’re the GW2 equivalent of “kill X of monster Y and return to me for a terrible reward” that most other MMOs use as a form of questing. I really can’t get behind the idea of resetting those and forcing people to redo them or any other type of PvE content every month. The game should be becoming more flexible for veteran and new players alike, not more restrictive.

Noone should be forced to do them, but if you want to them, you should be able to do them again and you should get goodies for doing so. I’ve already said, instead of the 46c – 5s reward, they could give you 1 item from the heart vendor for free.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Karma

I would also like to submit that karma has another issue which is that whenever you purchase something you are setting back your progress towards other purchases.

Now that’s interesting.

Have you considered rewarding players for only getting to a certain karma-treshhold without them having to spend the karma for that reward?

Something like a prestige-armorset or a precursor (idk, throwing around random ideas) which can only be purchased (via an other currency) when one has a specific amount of karma in his wallet. So people have to weight if they would spend their karma for certain goals or hoard it for that specific prestige goal.

(of course, such a feature must be announced LOOONG before it goes live, since people would complain horribly that they “just” spent all the karma on Orr-boxes because they had no idea something like this would happen. Can’t please everyone)

…on the other hand… it would be pretty similar to the achievement-point system where you can’t have negative-progress.

Some people would like to an option repeat hearts. Many people are opposed to being required to repeat hearts which is probably enough reason not to require it. In the future we ought to consider repeat rewards or even a prestige system for voluntarily replaying one-time content.

I’m just throwing this out there because I understand that it may be difficult to implement, but how about this:

1. You complete a heart. It fills up with gold and turns gold. You get prizes, your world completion is ticked up, the merchant is permanently unlocked, you can move on happy and fulfilled.

2. You liked that heart and want to do it again! You go up to it and start doing things that tick it up, like feeding cows or fighting relevant mobs.

3. Now, instead of filling the heart with gold, since it’s already gold, you start filling the heart with green, on top of that gold. When it maxes out, you get a reward pack again, and the heart resets back to being gold.

4. There’s a lot of options in how to actually do that, depending on what you want for us. It could be something you can only repeat daily, or monthly. It could have the rewards lowered, or even raised in some cases. Some heart quests might not give any rewards the second time because they are seen as trivial. Some might take longer the second time, requiring more effort.

But in any case, I think that’s a model that would allow people to redo them, without ever forcing anyone to redo them.

Personally, I feel that effective reward systems regularly disperse rewards along the path to a longer term goal. (If you haven’t checked out PvP Reward Tracks, you should!)

I would, but currently you can only increment them by doing PvP, which I have no interest in. Has there been any talk about letting players advance the PvP tracks through non-PvP activities?

But in specific regard to this thread, your question asks the possibility: could we keep maps fresh by adding tons and tons of events? In my experience, a large complexity factor in event implementation is other events. Any time an event is placed near another, we have to at least consider how they will interact. There’s one interaction between two events, two between three, five between four, nine between five, and so on. Returns definitely diminish. Over time we’ve come up with some effective techniques and patterns to mitigate this, but the cost is greater than zero.

I have to say, one problem I remembered from when I was new to the game, is not being able to find active events. Like it would be possible to wander Queensdale from one end to the other, and not encounter a single active event, or to wander the same path and encounter dozens of events along the way, it all depended on your luck and the event timing.

It would be a good idea to have more events so that at least one would be happening within range at all times, with no breaks in between. Also, and this is VITAL, you need to do a better job of advertising active events so that players know to flock to them. The current UI only displays very close-by events, making it much harder to find active ones.

Ideally the UI would show ALL active events on the map, and also perhaps show a progress bar/timer next to each of them, so you would be able to guess your chances of getting there in time. That way, if you were in the center of the map, you could see one event at one end that is almost over and realize you’d never make it in time, while seeing another on the other side and seeing that you likely have 3-5 minutes to get there.

another suggestion what to do with karma:

it sounds horrible first, I guess, but read on to the end please
—> make a really low cap to karma (e.g. 100.000)

this way people would actually spend karma (with the prerequisite that there are enough interesting new rewards coming into the game regularly) instead of hoard it because… you know sometime there might be that ultra-reward where you need 100.000.000 karma.

They would spend karma because you’re capped anyway and can’t get more karma at that point.

Now what with all the people with huge amounts of karma, how would you compensate those? Tough one. A random idea:

People can get a karma-token for every 100.000 karma which can be turned into 50.000 karma (fill the half cap) BUT with a timegate. You don’t want them spend millions of karma at once because they would stop playing the game to gain karma. Say: you can use each karma-token only once a month.

I think a cap would be healthy for karma gain since people would be more open to spend the karma.

what if you could turn a full karma cap into 200gems each month? ^^ Rewarding players for their loyalty… of course the cap could then be a bit higher than 100.000 karma

HHR LostProphet.4801:

Noone should be forced to do them, but if you want to them, you should be able to do them again and you should get goodies for doing so. I’ve already said, instead of the 46c – 5s reward, they could give you 1 item from the heart vendor for free.

I don’t have a problem with people having the option to redo them. I do have a problem with people losing progress and being forced to redo stuff. We already had that happen with fractals and that definitely didn’t go over very well.

The heart vendors have mostly useless items that are only useful to characters that are leveling. Karma isn’t even an issue if you just play the game semi-regularly. Getting an item for free might save you an event or two worth of karma. That’s hardly a reward. And to make it worse, you can’t even salvage or put the items in the Mystic Forge. Nor can you sell them to vendors. So basically, the item would just be something to throw away. I’d rather just have the silver or copper. But with the gold inflation being what it is, the copper/silver would be just as worthless as the karma items themselves.

A better solution would be to give the karma vendors items that people would actually be interested in buying with karma. That would actually be a reward.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Thanks for all your comments, everyone!

I’ve been checking in on this thread pretty regularly and I appreciate the thoughtful discussions. I wish I had time to reply to everything but it’s a busy day and the thread is growing larger so as a quick alternative I’ll throw out some potential takeaway points to summarize the discussion:

• The reward structure in Dry Top is desirable for many people. But Dry Top lacks some favorable elements from earlier open world maps such as chaining or random events. My thought here is that one does not exclude the other and in the future we could incorporate both the best of both designs.

• Some people would like to an option repeat hearts. Many people are opposed to being required to repeat hearts which is probably enough reason not to require it. In the future we ought to consider repeat rewards or even a prestige system for voluntarily replaying one-time content.

• Karma may be an underwhelming common event currency. Many people would like to see it applied towards a greater variety of personal reward goals such as crafting materials, more skins, etc. People seem favorable to region specific rewards, but at some point we have to reconcile the notion that it would probably further devaluate karma. I would also like to submit that karma has another issue which is that whenever you purchase something you are setting back your progress towards other purchases. Of course, that’s a fundamental aspect of currency and yet, it’s less intrinsically rewarding than gold because you can use gold to make more gold (gear upgrades, crafting, trading, etc). At the level 80 end especially, big karma sinks are largely cosmetic and will not help you earn more karma. Personally, I feel that effective reward systems regularly disperse rewards along the path to a longer term goal. (If you haven’t checked out PvP Reward Tracks, you should!)

Lastly this:

LunarNacht.8913:

@AnthonyOrdon.3926: How hard is it to create dynamic events? I thought to remember an article back at release that your systems allowed to create new events in a short time.

Good question! The answer: it depends. Largely on the complexity of the event and the experience level of the event designer. I can create a very simple event very quickly. Things such as interesting characters, voiced scenes, event criers, new mechanics, new items, finely tuned scaling, new bosses, new boss abilities, world impact, and chained events are examples of things that will give an event higher implementation cost. Some events feature none of those and some are all of the above. Complexity is also deceptively difficult to perceive. Clockwork Invasions, for example, appear to be many, many events but conceptually they were just one very large event, which is much less expensive. When I implemented those, I deliberately sacrificed depth to achieve breadth. In retrospect, a little more depth was definitely in order. But we were able to create what was more or less a brand new experience and we have those lessons to apply if we revisit the concept in the future (which I intend to do, at the right place and time).

But in specific regard to this thread, your question asks the possibility: could we keep maps fresh by adding tons and tons of events? In my experience, a large complexity factor in event implementation is other events. Any time an event is placed near another, we have to at least consider how they will interact. There’s one interaction between two events, two between three, five between four, nine between five, and so on. Returns definitely diminish. Over time we’ve come up with some effective techniques and patterns to mitigate this, but the cost is greater than zero.

Clearly I’m willing to ramble over this, so maybe someday we should have a thread on event complexity vs fun vs replayability. ;]

Thank you very much for this post. This sort of inside view is exactly what I would look for in rock solid dev/player communication.

Thanks for your input Anthony, but seeing how you formulate some of this, mainly the thing that this thread is about, I do think you miss out on some things… and one thing is still going way over my head…

- Some people would like to an option repeat hearts. Many people are opposed to being required to repeat hearts which is probably enough reason not to require it. In the future we ought to consider repeat rewards or even a prestige system for voluntarily replaying one-time content.

Required? The only person I can sort of feel for in this regard is the OCD guy, who will either have to be very careful not to complete a single heart, so that he then has to do them all, or just do them all, and be busy grinding hearts every month instead of other things… Seeing that would ruin his enjoyment I rather not see something that would cause this.

To me the rest are just using w/e argument to not have hearts reset, and ‘why’ entirely eludes me, they seem to not have the faintest idea what hearts do for the game, nor do they seem to be empathetic enough to see what it could do for somebody else. All I read is ‘rewards rewards rewards’… they won’t do w/e you put in this game if it doesn’t at least reward as much as what the latest FotM reward chain gives. The other ‘sollution’ is “well I don’t want to redo them, so you go make a new character”… as if they ‘have to’ do something? They choose to do w/e they do and don’t do all the other stuff by choice, so why would they choose to redo hearts if they don’t want to!
( sorry that I have to share this frustration in this manner but it’s really frustrating to see this attitude towards something that could help or please others ) And it’s not that I discard their opinion as un-valuable, I would love to see a solution that pleases all of us (it be nice though if they were to have the same stance on that) but anyways:

If I were to take anything from this thread than it would be:
- A global reset of hearts would give to many people the impression they would have to redo them. This is not what this heart reset thread wants to achieve… While I initially thought an addition to the Daily/Monthly could provide people with another choice, apparently people see them as ‘Have to do’ lists, which makes this fit the same category.

- By having a ‘one time’ heart, the function of the hearts is lost after the heart is completed. This means that this function is now lacking in the game. This is most noticeably: a way to give people some background information and regional lore (after not having been to an area for an extended period of time); and provide players with a place to go to pick up DE’s.

-!- The ‘best’ solution suggested so far would be to give people the choice to reset a single heart for themselves so that they can redo it, gain access to the background information, and enjoy doing that bit of content while they ‘wait’ for DE’s nearby to kick off.

As it would not compel anyone to feel like they ‘have to’ do these hearts, it would give this OCD guy a way to not be compelled to grind out hearts every month. Yet it would give those that want to do Dynamic Events, a way to find them, and a way to have some background to them, as well as give them something to do while they wait for the DE. It would also give players that help out others to level a way to participate in their friends activities. It would do all the positive things that hearts provide, yet provide non of the negative things people come up with.

All the other stuff that came up in the thread is good feedback, I agreed with most of it, some ideas were better than others, but non solved the issues that this thread hoped to solve by making hearts repeatable. Another thing I worry about is that I personally hoped for a somewhat easy solution, something that wouldn’t take an actual rebuild of all the areas. Esp. with all the upheaval going on about ‘content added to the game that ANet has to ’show for’ after 2 years’, I doubt any addition to the maps that does not give very good rewards will be reason for people to throw a fit. With a somewhat easy solution you would be able to put efforts there where people mostly seem to want it, and by doing so please me (and the some ) as well as please the many .

Arghore.8340:

Thanks for your input Anthony, but seeing how you formulate some of this, mainly the thing that this thread is about, I do think you miss out on some things… and one thing is still going way over my head…

- Some people would like to an option repeat hearts. Many people are opposed to being required to repeat hearts which is probably enough reason not to require it. In the future we ought to consider repeat rewards or even a prestige system for voluntarily replaying one-time content.

Required? The only person I can sort of feel for in this regard is the OCD guy, who will either have to be very careful not to complete a single heart, so that he then has to do them all, or just do them all, and be busy grinding hearts every month instead of other things… Seeing that would ruin his enjoyment I rather not see something that would cause this.

To me the rest are just using w/e argument to not have hearts reset, and ‘why’ entirely eludes me, they seem to not have the faintest idea what hearts do for the game, nor do they seem to be empathetic enough to see what it could do for somebody else. All I read is ‘rewards rewards rewards’… they won’t do w/e you put in this game if it doesn’t at least reward as much as what the latest FotM reward chain gives. The other ‘sollution’ is “well I don’t want to redo them, so you go make a new character”… as if they ‘have to’ do something? They choose to do w/e they do and don’t do all the other stuff by choice, so why would they choose to redo hearts if they don’t want to!
( sorry that I have to share this frustration in this manner but it’s really frustrating to see this attitude towards something that could help or please others ) And it’s not that I discard their opinion as un-valuable, I would love to see a solution that pleases all of us (it be nice though if they were to have the same stance on that) but anyways:

If I were to take anything from this thread than it would be:
- A global reset of hearts would give to many people the impression they would have to redo them. This is not what this heart reset thread wants to achieve…

- By having a ‘one time’ heart, the function of the hearts is lost after the heart is completed. This means that this function is now lacking in the game. This is most noticeably: a way to give people some background information and regional lore (after not having been to an area for an extended period of time); and provide players with a place to go to pick up DE’s.

-!- The ‘best’ solution suggested so far would be to give people the choice to reset a single heart for themselves so that they can redo it, gain access to the background information, and enjoy doing that bit of content while they ‘wait’ for DE’s nearby to kick off.

As it would not compel anyone to feel like they ‘have to’ do these hearts, it would give this OCD guy a way to not be compelled to grind out hearts every month. Yet it would give those that want to do Dynamic Events, a way to find them, and a way to have some background to them, as well as give them something to do while they wait for the DE. It would also give players that help out others to level a way to participate in their friends activities. It would do all the positive things that hearts provide, yet provide non of the negative things people come up with.

All the other stuff that came up in the thread is good feedback, I agreed with most of it, some ideas were better than others, but non solved the issues that this thread hoped to solve by making hearts repeatable. Another thing I worry about is that I personally hoped for a somewhat easy solution, something that wouldn’t take an actual rebuild of all the areas. Esp. with all the upheaval going on about ‘content added to the game that ANet has to ’show for’ after 2 years’, I doubt any addition to the maps that does not give very good rewards will be reason for people to throw a fit. With a somewhat easy solution you would be able to put efforts there where people mostly seem to want it, and by doing so please me (and the some ) as well as please the many .

I think that the comment about being required was in response to some posters in the thread not understanding that your suggestion was meant to be (clearly stated so as well) optional.

Personally I find Dry Top to be the most stale and boring zone in the game. I can’t even stomach going there any more. It’s the same horrible over tuned events going on in the same spots every day. My main issue with the place is no thought was put into how this zone would be used by the players. I’ve been to Dry Top hundreds of times, and every single time I’ve seen a group of players doing events they just follow the same few easily accessed easily finished events over and over and over. The zone has 20 times more events than is used by the general player population. The cause is the majority of the events are not functioning due to criminally over tuned champions in them. Most of the event champs are static tuned to require 75 people to even attempt it. There’s one sand monster thing that attacks the race event once in awhile and if you attack it with 30 people it wont even take damage before the event times out because he spam spawns monsters that grant him immunity faster than a group of the 30 best players in the game could kill. Why do the Dry Top events not scale to how many people are participating? If people want impossible content put it in instances. Stop destroying overland zones with content that can’t be done. Stop assuming every zone instance is going to have capped population all singularly focused on zerging events. You have the scaling tech, use it.

Zedd.8239:

The hearts are some of the most uninteresting PvE content in the game. They’re the GW2 equivalent of “kill X of monster Y and return to me for a terrible reward” that most other MMOs use as a form of questing. I really can’t get behind the idea of resetting those and forcing people to redo them or any other type of PvE content every month. The game should be becoming more flexible for veteran and new players alike, not more restrictive.

This is my problem. Some heart quests are absolutely boring me to tears, such as the one in Snowden Drifts where you have to trade rabbits and ore to the Jotun; or the one where you have to pick up rabbit food and take it here without getting beaten up by a rabbit (srsly?? this is so dumb). I would have no problem redoing renown hearts or any other events for some special XP or special rewards, but my lord ANet, rework them to be remotely interesting. It’s because of heart quests that I detest world completion. I would take getting my butt kicked by entire zergs in WvW any day over redoing those awful, boring, quests.

Thank you for listening.

Asgaeroth.6427:

Personally I find Dry Top to be the most stale and boring zone in the game. I can’t even stomach going there any more. It’s the same horrible over tuned events going on in the same spots every day. My main issue with the place is no thought was put into how this zone would be used by the players. I’ve been to Dry Top hundreds of times, and every single time I’ve seen a group of players doing events they just follow the same few easily accessed easily finished events over and over and over. The zone has 20 times more events than is used by the general player population. The cause is the majority of the events are not functioning due to criminally over tuned champions in them. Most of the event champs are static tuned to require 75 people to even attempt it. There’s one sand monster thing that attacks the race event once in awhile and if you attack it with 30 people it wont even take damage before the event times out because he spam spawns monsters that grant him immunity faster than a group of the 30 best players in the game could kill. Why do the Dry Top events not scale to how many people are participating? If people want impossible content put it in instances. Stop destroying overland zones with content that can’t be done. Stop assuming every zone instance is going to have capped population all singularly focused on zerging events. You have the scaling tech, use it.

I agree. I personally detest Dry Top because the entire area has become an event grind. No thanks. Boring. Still haven’t finished the LS because I just can’t even go there anymore.

Ashen.2907:

I think that the comment about being required was in response to some posters in the thread not understanding that your suggestion was meant to be (clearly stated so as well) optional.

Nah, while most people just throw a fit because -its the internet-, there were some people with reasonable comments that pointed out the same thing. I think the whole Daily thing got adjusted not to long ago because people saw it as a ‘have to do all’ list instead of a ‘do w/e you want, you will likely finish 5 of these b4 you are done playing, so we are going to give you this extra thing’. I personally do not see why you would reduce other peoples options just because of the behaviour of some, but that isn’t my choice… In the end it doesn’t effect me much if anything, and if it helps others I am generally for it, same reason why I would rather have something that pleases all than have something that kittenes of various people, even if I think their reasoning is entirely irrational.

ozmaniandevil.6805:

Zedd.8239:

The hearts are some of the most uninteresting PvE content in the game. They’re the GW2 equivalent of “kill X of monster Y and return to me for a terrible reward” that most other MMOs use as a form of questing. I really can’t get behind the idea of resetting those and forcing people to redo them or any other type of PvE content every month. The game should be becoming more flexible for veteran and new players alike, not more restrictive.

This is my problem. Some heart quests are absolutely boring me to tears, such as the one in Snowden Drifts where you have to trade rabbits and ore to the Jotun; or the one where you have to pick up rabbit food and take it here without getting beaten up by a rabbit (srsly?? this is so dumb). I would have no problem redoing renown hearts or any other events for some special XP or special rewards, but my lord ANet, rework them to be remotely interesting. It’s because of heart quests that I detest world completion. I would take getting my butt kicked by entire zergs in WvW any day over redoing those awful, boring, quests.

Thank you for listening.

Funny, you name two hearts that I had great joy in doing, the Jotun one was actually a nice change of pace, and the bunny one was both challenging as well as frustratingly fun and funny, also in a way that didn’t involve ‘hit 1 to succeed’.

So really, why only look at yourself, resetting hearts (in a personal choice model) will not effect you, why oppose it? Really, I’m interested to know…

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Thanks for all your comments, everyone!

Thanks for your attention Anthony!

• The reward structure in Dry Top is desirable for many people. But Dry Top lacks some favorable elements from earlier open world maps such as chaining or random events. My thought here is that one does not exclude the other and in the future we could incorporate both the best of both designs.

That has me more curious about what you mean, but so long as we’re looking at something which isn’t “do events for 40 minutes, then sandstorm for 20” in nature? I think you’d get something fun for most people.

• Some people would like to an option repeat hearts. Many people are opposed to being required to repeat hearts which is probably enough reason not to require it. In the future we ought to consider repeat rewards or even a prestige system for voluntarily replaying one-time content.

Probably the best way. I do note “required” is used in the same way as people are “required” to do things for achievements if they want the goodies. I would like the option to repeat some of the hearts but the ones in low-level zones aren’t all that . . . how do I put this.

At least one of them makes me want to kill bunnies with nuclear weapons.

I would suggest a limit on the replay. Not “only once” but ‘only once within a certain time window’ or ‘only once until something happens to reset a heart, like a nearby event’. Like needing to upkeep the one Shaemoor farm after bandits poison the water supply successfully (requiring one of the events in that block to fail) or explode the pipes (a failure of a different sort), but only after the successful cleaning/repair of the water system.

• Karma may be an underwhelming common event currency.

I’d say more along the line of “Karma is an underwhelming common event currency”, but that’s because that’s what I think of it. Though it is useful, sometimes.

Clearly I’m willing to ramble over this, so maybe someday we should have a thread on event complexity vs fun vs replayability. ;]

Go kidnap Chris and “suggest” it as a CDI topic.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Thanks for all your comments, everyone!

• Karma may be an underwhelming common event currency. Many people would like to see it applied towards a greater variety of personal reward goals such as crafting materials, more skins, etc. People seem favorable to region specific rewards, but at some point we have to reconcile the notion that it would probably further devaluate karma. I would also like to submit that karma has another issue which is that whenever you purchase something you are setting back your progress towards other purchases. Of course, that’s a fundamental aspect of currency and yet, it’s less intrinsically rewarding than gold because you can use gold to make more gold (gear upgrades, crafting, trading, etc). At the level 80 end especially, big karma sinks are largely cosmetic and will not help you earn more karma. Personally, I feel that effective reward systems regularly disperse rewards along the path to a longer term goal. (If you haven’t checked out PvP Reward Tracks, you should!)

A few thoughts:

-Chaining events are very important to me. I wish all events chained into others. I like discovering things in the game world that directly lead me elsewhere.

-What if we had PVE reward tracks? They could be exactly like the PVP ones but you would have to do dynamic events or hearts of any level to fill them up. This idea solves many issues in my opinion.

1) No new currency would need to be added. Other systems could remain as is.

2) Incentive to complete old content and go looking for events.

3) Reward progress could be equalized between events from different level ranges so that we could choose to go anywhere we wanted. Progress amount could be determined on a percentage basis like experience is.

4) Small dev time involved (likely) since we could port the pvp system over and add new skins at a later time.

5) You could even make it regional. “Complete Krytan events or hearts to fill out this reward track and earn Krytan themed rewards.”

Again, I am looking for simple ways to spice up old content. I personally love the PVP reward tracks and I wish that I could do something similar in PVE. I could be wrong, but I believe a system like this might make sense in the game world. It might even be possible to hold this feature until a class hits 80 in order to not overwhelm new players and cater specifically to the veterans.

Also, now that I think of it, there are several dungeon armors I wish that I could have without having to grind PVP or dungeons to get. I would seriously take the reward tracks as they are.

I don’t know if “repeatable” is the best method to use here. The tasks related to a heart should remain open and doable after it’s completed, but the heart can stay full.

The change I recommend is that after you fill a heart, you can contribute to increasing the region’s reward level. Everything you do that would normally fill the heart now increases a Dry Top-like gauge that gives players in the area a small boost (maybe Magic Find). If left alone, the gauge will drop over time.

Two things need to be done to make this work: 1) Let us see a heart’s area. When we hover over the heart, put a circle on the map like we see for events. Some of the areas should be expanded. 2) Make sure that all hearts are easy to work on, so players passing through can easily do one or two things to feel helpful without being seriously held up. Killing any aggressive (red) enemies should count, and specific foes or objects need to have appropriate spawn rates.

Broseph.9283:

-What if we had PVE reward tracks? They could be exactly like the PVP ones but you would have to do dynamic events or hearts of any level to fill them up. This idea solves many issues in my opinion.

1) No new currency would need to be added. Other systems could remain as is.

2) Incentive to complete old content and go looking for events.

3) Reward progress could be equalized between events from different level ranges so that we could choose to go anywhere we wanted.

4) Small dev time involved (likely) since we could port the pvp system over and add new skins at a later time.

5) You could even make it regional. “Complete Krytan events or hearts to fill out this reward track and earn Krytan themed rewards.”

Again, I am looking for simple ways to spice up old content. I personally love the PVP reward tracks and I wish that I could do something similar in PVE.

That . . . seems like it could work rather well.

Something tells me that the concept of Karma should be reshaped.

Much like laurels are a “time-gated currency”, which you receive for logging in (and do some dailies), Karma is some kind of “content-gated currency” that is common to the entire world map.

For this reason, I rather see Karma treated more like Laurels: with an unique merchant, with an unique set of karma-only rewards (tha goes beyond what we get in the temples), or even have both used for the same merchant, giving the player the choice between logging in and doing dailies, or doing other types of content (or both) to get those ascended trinkets.

Alternatively, I think this game lacks a “prestige” currency, one which you could use to unlock prestige rewards, and Karma could be revamped into that. Make all current karma merchants into gold merchants, remove karma from events and the like, and then add a new karma system that is only obtainable through challenging content. Players would then be able to unlock cosmetics, ascended gear, account conveniences and other stuff through this revamped karma currency as a sign of prestige.

EDIT
Karma could also be a tiered currency, with several different levels (think of copper->silver->gold, but without one automatically converting into the other). This way, low and mid tiers of karma would be used for what they currently are used: unlock rewards (from karma merchants) by your “casual heroic deeds”, and then a high tier of karma would only be obtainable from challenging content.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Broseph.9283:

-What if we had PVE reward tracks? They could be exactly like the PVP ones but you would have to do dynamic events or hearts of any level to fill them up. This idea solves many issues in my opinion.

1) No new currency would need to be added. Other systems could remain as is.

2) Incentive to complete old content and go looking for events.

3) Reward progress could be equalized between events from different level ranges so that we could choose to go anywhere we wanted.

4) Small dev time involved (likely) since we could port the pvp system over and add new skins at a later time.

5) You could even make it regional. “Complete Krytan events or hearts to fill out this reward track and earn Krytan themed rewards.”

Again, I am looking for simple ways to spice up old content. I personally love the PVP reward tracks and I wish that I could do something similar in PVE.

That . . . seems like it could work rather well.

I thought about something similar: A NPC, which gives you a task to help all his people. Basically you have to do all events that deal with the group you want to help atleast once to get the reward.
Question is, what should be the reward? I don’t find the PvP rewards very compelling.

HHR LostProphet.4801:

Question is, what should be the reward? I don’t find the PvP rewards very compelling.

I find few current rewards very compelling, aside from doing them. But there are some people who really find it worthwhile so . . .

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

The intent of the Renown Heart system was originally to help players find event content. They also provide a decent method for us to give the player some context and awareness of what’s going on in the area. There are probably a few issues in that design which we could discuss. We could also let it suffice to say that hearts do not make the best repeatable content the game has to offer.

On the topic of keeping players engaged with open world content, I think this goal may be for more approachable from a different angle. Consider Dry Top, which has no hearts. Players on that map are participating in events all the time, largely on the premise that each event contributes to both map-level and personal-level goals. This gives me the notion that with a little help at the system level, events can and should be the bulk of repeatable open world content in Tyria.

I’d be very interested in hearing your thoughts on that.

People chase rewards. Doing events in Dry Top ultimately give good rewards. They are also fairly straightforward (do events, make the bar go up). If you want to bring people to the rest of the open world, you gotta reward them in ways that are tempting for people with a few lvl 80s.

Arghore.8340:

Make the hearts reset every month

An absolute, NO Thank you! I did world complete twice and there is NO JOY in repeating it. Especially when items are gated behind Hearts. No bleeping way do I want to have to go reopen hearts across all the maps again.

Talk about making this game supremely grindy.

I am going to go further with the token idea from a little ways up. (and I appologize if I am repeating anyone else, I didnt read eveything) Assuming the goal is to reward player for playing a certain map, it has been suggested that there are tokens and it has been suggested that there is a prestige feature. Suppose there is both. There are various levels of prestige that provide various tiers of rewards similar to dry top merchants. These merchants would unlock when you complete the last hear on the map (not necessarily map completion for that map). You can purchase these things with tokens acquired by repeating the requirements for hearts or doing events in the area, again, after all heats have been completed once.

Said rewards can be normal stuff, someone mentioned T6 crafting materials. It could be region specific consumables. Maybe something that gives a boost to karma gained from events in that area for 30 minutes. Higher tiers could be armor skins things like that.

I dont foresee the tiers being absurdly difficult to unlock. Rather, it would be a set of skins that takes longer to gather the tokens for then the top prestige level takes to unlock.

Some fun ideas I had. The last tier would have some items available that are rather expensive in terms of tokens (I dont really think things from these merchants need to have a cost in gold or karma) but are purely for fun/cosmetic. For instance….
-The last top buyable reward from Lornar’s Pass could be a backpack skin that is a pirate quaggan with a 3 point hat and eye patch (from the Suwash and the Unlikely Pirate event chain event)
-the last one from sparkfly could be headgear that looks like a kids Halloween mask of Tequatl
-(if the size of the model allows it) Harathi Hinterlands could give a back peice that looks like the back end of a horse that makes you look like a centaur (I dont know if I would buy it, but I think it would be funny)
-Metrica province fives a chest and hat together that look like a golem costume.

Of course, One other suggestion I might have with fun skins like that would be that 1) since they are essentially a reward for an achievement doing an areas events, they shouldnt require transmutation charges and 2) it would be really really nice if items had a, shall we say, native skin (you change this with transmutation charges) and achievements skins(zenith skins from achievement chests and these top prestige skins from tokens) could just be toggled on and off to and from the native skin. I dont know if number 2 is feasible, but it would be really really nice for those types of skins.

EDIT: O and minis can be a top reward too. I dont even know if the programming would allow this but it would also be fun if the top reward from Blazeridge were a mini shatterer that, when near other minis, would every once in a while put another mini is a little purple crystal (that disappeared when the owner of the other mini moved of course) Or in Mt Maelstrom the top one could be a mini MKII Golem that would either randomly shoot at player, npcs, other minis or at mobs you are fighting when it is out (doing no damage of course)

Dondarrion.2748:

Yea, I was a little sad to complete (unless there’s more to be added to the zone later) the Dry Top map on my character and not get that map completion reward.

There’s no reward for completing the Dry Top map?! Anet, is this WAI?

I’m not sure why someone wants a reward track in the PvE world, I’d rather find things in the zone rather than do events over and over until a full bar hands me over a gift-box. Reward tracks work for sPvP because you can’t explore anything during a PvP match. You focus on the battle against other players, which is variety enough. Having the same mechanic in the open world… meh.

Why not reward players for finding hidden treasure chests in some long lost cave or finding a rare spawned monster and hunting it down? Isn’t this more engaging than filling a bar by doing probably the same 5 events over and over again?

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

I’m not sure why someone wants a reward track in the PvE world, I’d rather find things in the zone rather than do events over and over until a full bar hands me over a gift-box. Reward tracks work for sPvP because you can’t explore anything during a PvP match. You focus on the battle against other players, which is variety enough. Having the same mechanic in the open world… meh.

Why not reward players for finding hidden treasure chests in some long lost cave or finding a rare spawned monster and hunting it down? Isn’t this more engaging than filling a bar by doing probably the same 5 events over and over again?

What about a reward track for finding all hidden places in one area?

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

I would also like to submit that karma has another issue which is that whenever you purchase something you are setting back your progress towards other purchases. Of course, that’s a fundamental aspect of currency and yet, it’s less intrinsically rewarding than gold because you can use gold to make more gold (gear upgrades, crafting, trading, etc). At the level 80 end especially, big karma sinks are largely cosmetic and will not help you earn more karma.

Small point of rebuttal regarding karma vs gold...

I play a relatively small amount. I love karma for the fact that it’s not continually running away from me with inflation like with gold as things get pricier to buy off the market.

For me, it’s a lower stress currency. There’s also no ‘auction house pvp’ involved.

But.. the idea of, say, transplanting the pvp reward tracks to the pve world? Innnnnteresting.

Asgaeroth.6427:

Personally I find Dry Top to be the most stale and boring zone in the game. I can’t even stomach going there any more. It’s the same horrible over tuned events going on in the same spots every day.

You realize that the same can be said to hearts? The same activity on the same spot every day.

Hearts aren’t the core content of the game for a reason: they make the dynamic world feel stale. Colin once told us of a world which is never the same. Play the zone a second time and you find new things going on (which was often true for me)… BUT hearts are always there. It kind of breaks this ever changing illusion. Hearts were implemented to guide new players, clearly an afterthought. Events are the true content which make the world feel alive…

…well at least they should. Colin also told us once that a zone which has 100 events at release will have 300 a year from then. Well that concept got scrapped (around halloween) when people didn’t comment on the new implemented events in the world. Were these events just ignored by the people while doing the halloween content? I don’t know, but it is as it is.

I think (I’m not sure) this was the birth of the living story. An attempt to make the world feel alive again. There were a lot of open world changes due to the LS in Season 1.

The thing is, and this is where I agree with you Asgaeroth, that currently the new map feels stale after a while. Events on a timetable don’t make the world feel alive. I still like the map because I haven’t played it too much yet and it’s quite new to me, but what happens when this goes away?

I’m not sure why events don’t spawn more randomly in that map. Why on a fixed schedule? To guarantee a chance for t6-reward vendors? Would event chains in that map really make the experience better? For me it would feel more and more like a karma-train. Meh. I think the best thing what could happen to Drytop would be something GW2 tried to achieve years ago when Colin talked about a changing zone. More surprises. Spawn fresh events, spawn them randomly, increase intervalls between other events and give us some unexpected events in between.

Now that we have a zone with a big incentive to do events, this could finally work out imho.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Asgaeroth.6427:

Personally I find Dry Top to be the most stale and boring zone in the game. I can’t even stomach going there any more. It’s the same horrible over tuned events going on in the same spots every day.

You realize that the same can be said to hearts? The same activity on the same spot every day.

Hearts aren’t the core content of the game for a reason: they make the dynamic world feel stale. Colin once told us of a world which is never the same. Play the zone a second time and you find new things going on (which was often true for me)… BUT hearts are always there. It kind of breaks this ever changing illusion. Hearts were implemented to guide new players, clearly an afterthought. Events are the true content which make the world feel alive…

What throws me off more than the “staleness” of the content is that, once I’ve completed a heart, they don’t want my help anymore, even if I want to help them again.

I personally like events very much, but I think that they give not enough reward to be worth doing as main content. I’ll do some events when I’m in the area and if I got the time. But never because I’m aiming for the reward.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Anthony, can you tell me why karma seems much less important now that it has been at release?

We have added a few karma sinks along the way but typically new content comes with a new currency, eg. candy corn or geodes. I haven’t personally implemented all of this content or currency but if I had to guess I would say that this pattern exists because we actually want to give you specific rewards for specific content.

I really dont like all these new currencies, there got to be other ways to make specific rewards for specific content. At least, add these “currencies” to the wallet instead of flooding our inventories, please.

HHR LostProphet.4801:

What about a reward track for finding all hidden places in one area?

Are you still talking about a bar which we have to fill? Why? Isn’t the world itself much more interesting than looking at a bar to fill?

Instead of getting a reward chest pop up in your UI, wouldn’t it be more fun to find a rare spawned chest (see: DryTop sandstorm). And then having a lockpick for this chest which you’ve bought from the zone-tokens you’ve earned by doing events… wouldn’t that feel rewarding?

Why not spawn very rare chests also. Bigger rewards but the big lockpick wouldn’t be cheap either.

No, that is just annoying if you have to buy the lockpick first. Why make it so complicated with farming events for tokens and then searching for chests when you can just make the events rewarding?

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

HHR LostProphet.4801:

What about a reward track for finding all hidden places in one area?

Are you still talking about a bar which we have to fill? Why? Isn’t the world itself much more interesting than looking at a bar to fill?

Instead of getting a reward chest pop up in your UI, wouldn’t it be more fun to find a rare spawned chest (see: DryTop sandstorm). And then having a lockpick for this chest which you’ve bought from the zone-tokens you’ve earned by doing events… wouldn’t that feel rewarding?

Why not spawn very rare chests also. Bigger rewards but the big lockpick wouldn’t be cheap either.

I think we all can agree that the current rewards given through open world farming is way too poor.
The problem with chests is that they aren’t time gated. I agree that there should be some hidden places that give appropriate reward, but you only “find” those places once.
I want the people get involved with the maps and the NPCs on these maps. A reward track that fills if you do different events would serve that purpose. If you have a better idea, I’m curious to hear it.

I wonder why events have no surprise rewards now and then. Imagine having the chance for things like these when getting a gold medal:

• sometimes a surprising champion loot box
• rarely a mystic forge key
• rarely a dye
• rarely a mini
• rarely a lodestone
• very rarely a rune of holding (to craft 18 or 20slot bags)
• very rarely a rare dye
  etc.etc.

Simply a huge (seriously huge – anything could drop) loot-table. What I loved during the personal story: Rewards where you could choose one out of 3 items. Do this for events, people would love it. BUT with interesting rewards, cut the blues and greens & junkitems.

The thing is: when people know there is a chance (and even the slightest one) of getting something really really rare, they go miles to get it.

GreenAlien.5623:

No, that is just annoying if you have to buy the lockpick first. Why make it so complicated with farming events for tokens and then searching for chests when you can just make the events rewarding?

Because exploration needs to be rewarded in a game with a world that screams “explore me!!” to you. Why should people who explore a zone for an hour get so much worse rewards than people who run around with a champion train for an hour?

HHR LostProphet.4801:

The problem with chests is that they aren’t time gated. I agree that there should be some hidden places that give appropriate reward, but you only “find” those places once.
I want the people get involved with the maps and the NPCs on these maps. A reward track that fills if you do different events would serve that purpose. If you have a better idea, I’m curious to hear it.

Well they are in a way: you can’t have endless lockpicks because you need to work for the currency first.

You may find the places only once, but maybe you also find a new event in one of those areas another day. I like the idea of getting rewarded for doing different unique events though. But why not having the event-npcs give you better rewards, the more unique events you’ve done in that zone – instead of watching a bar grow and a chest pop up.

NPC after 2 unique events in a row per zone (without using a waypoint):
—> Hey man, we know you! Here have this – choose 1 of 2 rewards -

NPC after 4 unique events -//-
—> Hey mister, people talk about you!! Here have this – choose 1 out of 3 rewards -

NPC after 10 unique events -//-
—> Hey hero, we love you and want a baby from you!!! Here have this – choose 2 out of 5 rewards + 10 dungeon token

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

HHR LostProphet.4801:

The problem with chests is that they aren’t time gated. I agree that there should be some hidden places that give appropriate reward, but you only “find” those places once.
I want the people get involved with the maps and the NPCs on these maps. A reward track that fills if you do different events would serve that purpose. If you have a better idea, I’m curious to hear it.

Well they are in a way: you can’t have endless lockpicks because you need to work for the currency first.

You may find the places only once, but maybe you also find a new event in one of those areas another day. I like the idea of getting rewarded for doing different unique events though. But why not having the event-npcs give you better rewards, the more unique events you’ve done in that zone – instead of watching a bar grow and a chest pop up.

NPC after 2 unique events in a row per zone (without using a waypoint):
—> Hey man, we know you! Here have this – choose 1 of 2 rewards -

NPC after 4 unique events -//-
—> Hey mister, people talk about you!! Here have this – choose 1 out of 3 rewards -

NPC after 10 unique events -//-
—> Hey hero, we love you and want a baby from you!!! Here have this – choose 2 out of 5 rewards + 10 dungeon token

I’m supporting this, hands down. But I still think that reward track should grant additional reward. The reward tracks in PvP fill up rather slow compared to the loot you get at the end. So PvE reward tracks could give additional, rare items, while local vendors sell usefull, but more common stuff.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

GreenAlien.5623:

No, that is just annoying if you have to buy the lockpick first. Why make it so complicated with farming events for tokens and then searching for chests when you can just make the events rewarding?

Because exploration needs to be rewarded in a game with a world that screams “explore me!!” to you. Why should people who explore a zone for an hour get so much worse rewards than people who run around with a champion train for an hour?

But you have to farm tokens first. Best way to do it in maps with champ trains will be to run around with the champ train, which defeats the purpose.

GreenAlien.5623:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

GreenAlien.5623:

No, that is just annoying if you have to buy the lockpick first. Why make it so complicated with farming events for tokens and then searching for chests when you can just make the events rewarding?

Because exploration needs to be rewarded in a game with a world that screams “explore me!!” to you. Why should people who explore a zone for an hour get so much worse rewards than people who run around with a champion train for an hour?

But you have to farm tokens first. Best way to do it in maps with champ trains will be to run around with the champ train, which defeats the purpose.

That’s why the tokens should be gated in that way, that if more people participate, you’ll get less tokens. Also, you should get less tokens, if you repeat single events all the time, so people can’t just camp single events. This is supposed to spread the people over whole Tyria.

You can do that without tokens though, you can just award events much better the first time you do them, if you add that lockpick in the loottables you can even have that closed chest mechanic.

GreenAlien.5623:

You can do that without tokens though, you can just award events much better the first time you do them, if you add that lockpick in the loottables you can even have that closed chest mechanic.

No, I think local currencies are the best way to reward events. This lets you visit all zones from time to time and it will limit the dominating role of gold.

What is wrong with gold? If the way you accumulate gold gets properly balanced, there should be no issues. Local currencies are just a cheap solution for that. If i like a map more than other maps, why should i be penalized by accumulating a useless (once i have all the zone specific items and more keys than needed) currency? That’s a big issue with dungeons imo.

A way you earn gold isn’t ever going to be properly balanced when there is a desire, nay, a “need” . . . to have the most gold ever and not do anything with it except make more gold.

GreenAlien.5623:

What is wrong with gold? If the way you accumulate gold gets properly balanced, there should be no issues. Local currencies are just a cheap solution for that. If i like a map more than other maps, why should i be penalized by accumulating a useless (once i have all the zone specific items and more keys than needed) currency? That’s a big issue with dungeons imo.

Everything can be bought with gold. And I think that’s wrong. Because of that you can farm gold in dungeons or in Orr and buy things from the Shiverpeaks, without even visiting them. I do think that there should be a way to exchange the local currency for gold if you want to. But it should be more desirable to spend the local currency on the vendors for stuff you need, like crafting materials.

GreenAlien.5623:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

GreenAlien.5623:

No, that is just annoying if you have to buy the lockpick first. Why make it so complicated with farming events for tokens and then searching for chests when you can just make the events rewarding?

Because exploration needs to be rewarded in a game with a world that screams “explore me!!” to you. Why should people who explore a zone for an hour get so much worse rewards than people who run around with a champion train for an hour?

But you have to farm tokens first. Best way to do it in maps with champ trains will be to run around with the champ train, which defeats the purpose.

I haven’t seen that many champtrains on maps with dungeons lately. I might be wrong though. Anyway, events scale so they are solo about equally long as in a zerg. You get the token for event-completion, just like the geodes… so a zerg won’t help much.

And don’t make the mistake to decrease the reward when more players are there… GW2’s design philosophy is: you shouldn’t be afraid of seeing other players. It’s a social game after all.