Guild Wars 2

It’s not an uncommon topic: how do we make just playing out and about in the open world of Tyria more rewarding?

Seems the suggestions forum is gone so I’ll just drop this here…

So, I’ve thought about this a lot and I like my simple solution so much that I’ll permanently be a little bit sad unless something like it happens one day. This all stems from the idea that Dynamic Events in Guild Wars 2 are the meat, potatoes, veggies and dessert of the game. They’re great, and a ton of work was put into them. They are primarily unique to GW2 in that even games with similar contrivances (Rift and Wildstar each have their variations, as I understand it) are rudimentary in comparison.

There are so many. In every zone, so much content that is underutilized at best and entirely ignored at worst. Ignored! Some of the best content in the game, completely passed by, not even touched once a day. There are event chains in this game I absolutely love, some that can even last upwards of an hour, ultimately rewarding you with 20 or so silver and a few blues, greens and mob drops. This is a shame because even a player like me, who is happy to do content for the fun of it rather than the reward, will triage activities based on reward. In other words, if I’m choosing between two types of content, both of which I substantially enjoy, I will far more often choose the more lucrative one.

I attempt to solve this problem by unifying a few different concepts:

• Playing in almost any zone of the game should be substantially, and in some ways equally, rewarding
• Dynamic Event completion (success) should provide tangible rather than incidental rewards
• Adventuring throughout a zone clearing many events- making an impact on the fabric of that zone- should carry a sense of gameplay momentum with it
• Doing many different events should be rewarded greatly; repeatedly doing the same events should not be rewarded at all (thematically, the same idea as the changes to dungeon rewards)
• Ultimately, the best currency that can be delivered as a reward is always gold, because it’s the language of the trading post

I have framed this idea largely in cold, mathematical terms, but perhaps my favorite thing about it is that it makes a fair bit of sense in roleplaying terms, especially compared to the existing system. I’ll touch a bit on that again at the end.

Here goes.

Each unique dynamic event completed to success awards n silver, where n = the number of unique dynamic events completed in that zone. Repeating completed events would earn you no silver reward at all (XP/karma unaffected).

Put more simply: every new event you do in a zone earns you one more silver than the one before.

This would reset upon leaving a zone, and your “streak” potential for each zone would reset on the daily timer.

So as an example, if you go to Metrica Province and do 1 event it gives you 1 silver, do another event and it gives you 2 silver, do another and it gives you 3 silver, for a total of 6 silver for having done 3 unique events in that zone. The formula for how much you earn by doing how many events would be: (n * (n+1)) / 2.

So if you continue adventuring in that zone:

• 10 events will net you a total of 55 silver.
• 20 events will get you a total of 2 gold, 10 silver- on par with a run of COF1 + SE1.

That seems like a lot of gold for “just events” at first, but think about it: if you’ve completed 20 unique events in a row in a single zone, you are a force in that zone. You’ve severely shifted the battle lines with the centaurs in Kessex Hills, you’ve taken out a ton of Branded threats in Blazeridge Steppes, you’ve given the Inquest a run for their money and driven them from the Infinity Coil in Mount Maelstrom. There’s no doubt this would take longer than a couple of the easiest dungeon paths- but if you didn’t mind spending the time, you could keep going.

Under the existing system, event silver rewards vary by zone (and are apparently being further nerfed per devaluing champ trains), but 20 events would get you somewhere in the ballpark of 70 silver, and you’d be rewarded just the same even if you just repeated the same 4 events five times.

Once you break 30 events in my system the gold reward begins to grow quite quickly (4.6g for 30, 8.2g for 40). However, most zones have a total somewhere just a bit above 40 unique events, so that would mean either literally (or quite close to) clearing an enter zone of every dynamic event it has to offer. Frostgorge Sound, for example, has 53 including every Group Event, and every single step of both dynamic events- this would be quite a feat, and you’d be in that zone for hours. I legitimately believe that the ultimate gold-earning potential here isn’t a deal-breaker. Many events have self-limiting timers, and plenty of chains consume time just progressing between individual steps. It wouldn’t be physically possible to just clear an entire zone in an hour- and if someone wants to spend 4 hours in a single zone tackling every single opportunity they find, why shouldn’t they be rewarded as though they’d done, say, 2 hours of dungeons?

Alternatively, if the gold acquisition rate was deemed a serious problem, the streak could just be capped- say after 25, no new events would reward you- though if you left and came back, you could start a new streak with the events you hadn’t gotten to yet that day, starting back at 1. Though again, I don’t think it would be necessary.

Your streak could even be represented as a simple little stack buff in the UI (“Wildlands Samaritan,” “Kessex Defender”) that simply drops upon leaving the zone.

Think about how this new system would feel in practice. You’d get your party or guild together, pick a zone and head out into the world to start adventuring. As you clear more and more of the problems you come across, the gold starts to pile up- the denizens of that zone offering their thanks for your hard work. Soon most of the obvious, high-profile events have been done- but there is more of Tyria in need of help, more insidious evil to fell. So you’ll press deeper into the nooks and crannies of the zone- maybe there’s one underground you forgot about- maybe there’s one you’ve never seen before. Every unique event represents an opportunity to keep your streak alive in that zone, and once you’ve got an “epic streak” going you’ll just be hunting for more to do in that zone. Each explorable map in Tyria is a playground of opportunity. Bonus points if you get some sort of recognition for maxing your streak, literally clearing every single event in the zone, which I suppooooooose could be an achievement, though I’d feel sorry for the OCD-laden out there.

Potentially Asked Questions:
“You moron. People will just find the most optimal dynamic event paths to do the quickest for gold with the least amount of effort!”

You’ve just described the exact scenario taking place right now within every avenue of content that offers adequate gold reward. This would merely be adding a new lane to that highway, and in terms of time investment, making real money this way would still not surpass other daily methods for pure efficiency.

“What about that happening in the newbie zones? Sure the Queensdale champ train would be gone, but wouldn’t you be replacing it with a constant stream of people doing all the easy events in a set sequence, subject to the same toxic environment?”

Yeah. I’ve thought a lot about this, and I say we just go with Occam’s Razor: this simply shouldn’t be in effect in the 5 newbie zones of the game. Or in more humorous form: No streaking in front of the kids!

“If this wouldn’t actually make me more gold per hour than a dungeon rotation or [other activity x], what’s the point?”

In-game activities don’t have to be the most profitable thing to do to be worthwhile. There’s a “fun vs. reward” dynamic that every player considers constantly during a play session, and the ratio is different for almost every individual who logs in. This simply makes dynamics events- some of the game’s best content- relevant in terms of reward. For my part, I would take advantage of this constantly no matter how outclassed it was by other methods of making gold.

“What about event contribution levels- Gold, Silver, Bronze medals? What about failure?”

Good questions. One way of handling it would be to have only Gold give you the full, n+1, reward, while Silver and Bronze give roughly what they do now, but still increment your streak. I think this would be a good balance between rewarding the prime contributors over tagalongs and tailgaters, but without punishing them too harshly- stick around, get gold on the next one and you get the full reward.

If you fail an event, I’m totally down with giving XP, but you really shouldn’t get any gold for it.
I don’t understand why that happens.

“You’re dramatically upsetting the rate of gold acquisition during the leveling process. You really want first-timer level 30s earning multiple gold per hour?”

No, that’s a good point. I think I’d like it most if the ability to earn “streak” rewards was just something that you unlocked per character by reaching level 80. This would mesh well with the “entire game is endgame” motif- after all, you’re not doing anything you couldn’t have done while leveling- but also provide a new answer to “well what am I supposed to do at level 80?” as suddenly every zone in the game is a newly ample source of fun and profit.

Congratulations on making it to the end of my idea! I’ll take your questions and criticisms now, though beware my concept is completely bulletproof.

Sounds intriguing. I hope the Devs notice it and consider it, or something like it. Well done!

The new skin system going to be a major help to get ppl to want to do things in the open world. All you need to do after this new system is in places is just add more skins to the open world maybe new champ bags weapons even champ bag armor and more end of event karma venders or even hidden karma venders that randomly spawn. Its very endless what can be done with skins and at least some ppl will always try to get them all.

I didn’t think about that enough to say if its a good idea or not. But the intent behind this are freaking great. I would love to make Maps train. Tag up with 5-10 of my guildmates and take over the whole maps, taking in route a couple of pugs that run around the maps.

That would be awesome for people doing map completion, they would have a lot of company while doing some gold. That would also be a blast for new players. They see a bunch of 15-20 player running next to them and join them on their quests over the map. They do that today at queensdale, but its for the same 4-5 events. With a similar system they would do 10-20-30 differents events. Tbh i’m pretty sure in the last 1.5 year i maybe done 30-40% of all the dynamic events. That would be nice to view the other stuff and getting some reward for it.

I’m a kind of explorer my self. I’ve done World completion relatively early with all puzzles (in the first two-three months) with my first character and I loved some chain events that I discovered then. Now I wish some new permanent content to explore, new zones, events, quests, puzzles…
With a better reward for events as you suggested, I surely be more enthusiastic to explore more in depth the Guild Wars 2 world and not feel that I lose money not doing some daily dungeons and World Bosses in my play time.
I’m completely with you on this!

Thanks for the support! There are really awesome event chains out there that I know a vast majority of players haven’t seen. I run into people that haven’t done Flame Temple Tombs in Diessa all the time, and that’s one of the freaking daily rare events! It’s such a rich world, jam-packed with stuff and characters and action, and I know this would make the prospect of adventuring across the map more appealing for many.

I think this sounds like a great idea! With the way things are now, so many areas are completely devoid of players, and this would be a wonderful incentive to get people back out into the world. Even if the final outcome is only similar to this idea, I believe the devs should definitely consider this! Good job!

Another thing: Spread all resource nods towards all maps, to balance the rewards on all maps and be possible to find all tiers on them, what is right now only possible on lvl 80 maps.

If there is already level requirements depending of the resource tier, i don’t see the reason to don’t spread them to make our exploration rewarding on all maps.

Another thing is the mats mobs drop at lower level maps, that are again, not rewarding as the normal 80lvl-farm maps, it should be possible to find a way to make them drop their mats depending of our level and not their levels.

If difficulty is better adapted on all maps to be equally difficult as one lvl 80 map, it should be rewarding like one as well.

It is good idea, and I love it. But I am afraid it is never going to happen.

First of all, it would give too much money for players, and whole game economy would be ruined and inflation would start to raise prices. ANet would need to figure out new gold sinks in that point to keep playerbase poor and prices low. Like jumping to the another waypoint cost 3 gold for level 80 character.

Second, ANet don’t want to see, that players get rich By playing this game, they want that ppl will buy gems in real money and convert them to the game money. If players would get too much gold from the game, they could buy easily gems By game gold and ANet would lost a lot of money in that way. It is not good business to run company in that way. They need incomings to pay sallaries and social security costs, rents, electricity, servers operating expences and so on and so on.

Third Anet is a Company and every Company need to make profit. They can not convert game money to the profit or if their playerbase is rich they are not doing profit.

So your suggestion is great for players, but ANet point of view it is awful scenario.

Interesting idea. I prefer adventuring to champ trains.

+1 love it

I love the Dynamic Events in GW2 and think they’re highly under-utilized, both by players and devs alike. Game expansion should come in the form of more and new DEs to make the world feel like it’s evolving due to our actions. As such, our actions should also be rewarding, so I like the idea that investing time & effort into a particular zone being just that.

I’ve spent 1500+ hours mostly running around the open world raising alts, and I pay for that by being poor as I do what I like, actually seeing the game world alive. I love this idea!!! Now I’ll be sad too if they don’t do it :/

I wholeheartedly support an idea like this. There is a big, beautiful game world out there but the best rewards are locked away in repetitive farming of dungeons, champs, and world bosses. One of the reasons I left GW2 is that I felt like I had to choose between immersing myself in the world or getting endgame rewards.

It would be possible to also add some incentive to switch up zones. The kill-streak reward could diminish if you’ve done it in a zone earlier that week, so that if you want to keep adventuring and getting the kill-streak bonus, you would move through different maps throughout the week.

In addition to endgame resource nodes and gold, I would like to see Ascended materials, Empyreal and Dragonite, available from simply adventuring across the world. They can drop in much lower rates than doing dungeons/world bosses/etc, but if there is at least a small trickle then eventually the player who makes the entire world his playground will amass enough to create Ascended gear.

The dynamic event-based world was the thing that had the most potential in the original vision of GW2, but it seems to have been largely abandoned shortly after launch. Endgame players need to be rewarded for continuing to engage this content, and ArenaNet needs to get back to developing the idea into everything it could be.

It is an absolute myth that DEs are too easy for rewards. There are mid-level DEs that will make a player on a level 80 character do far more work and at greater risk than zerging world bosses or speed-running dungeons.

Along with the OP’s idea, I would also like to remind ArenaNet of the perennial suggestion to somehow reward infrequently done DEs and Champs. The content in the corners of the world where people rarely go should have dynamically adjusting rewards, so that players who choose to adventure off in search of the less travelled path will get rewarded for doing so. Imagine Tyria with a player base constantly looking for that Champion or DE that is rarely encountered.

Hawkian….. your base idea for giving end game players incentive for completing the awesome content that Anet has put into this game is honestly awesome. And I am with you 110% on believing some system, implemented in this fashion, would yield VERY HIGH numbers of players to explore the world and STAY out in the world. Rather than just sitting at the HUB.
The reward doesn’t have to be your exact idea, as you have said, BUT this NEEDS to become a thing.
Because even the Traits thing Anet is implementing to have players explore will only have a short term impact, and then the activity will die back down again.

I will be stopping by this thread to read other’s thoughts…..often.

+1

Would absolutely love something like this. Dynamic events are what makes this game unique, and there’s almost zero incentive to do them now, so almost no one’s doing them. People should populate Tyria once again!

Dynamic events are dead! Long live dynamic events!

Seriously, ANet has killed dynamic events. The Dynamic Events forum has been closed and moved to the archives. Open world is Living Story now.

Malleus Maleficarum.2603:

I’ve spent 1500+ hours mostly running around the open world raising alts, and I pay for that by being poor as I do what I like, actually seeing the game world alive. I love this idea!!! Now I’ll be sad too if they don’t do it :/

Same here don’t own a single exotic set but have 8 alts and most of what I do is map completion (and rp). Would feel excellent to see a gamestyle like this supported for once.

Sinope.5630:

It is good idea, and I love it. But I am afraid it is never going to happen.

First of all, it would give too much money for players, and whole game economy would be ruined and inflation would start to raise prices. ANet would need to figure out new gold sinks in that point to keep playerbase poor and prices low. Like jumping to the another waypoint cost 3 gold for level 80 character.

Second, ANet don’t want to see, that players get rich By playing this game, they want that ppl will buy gems in real money and convert them to the game money. If players would get too much gold from the game, they could buy easily gems By game gold and ANet would lost a lot of money in that way. It is not good business to run company in that way. They need incomings to pay sallaries and social security costs, rents, electricity, servers operating expences and so on and so on.

Third Anet is a Company and every Company need to make profit. They can not convert game money to the profit or if their playerbase is rich they are not doing profit.

So your suggestion is great for players, but ANet point of view it is awful scenario.

Forgive me, but if this is meant to be serious, I addressed almost literally every aspect of your argument here in the questions at the bottom. This would not, by any stretch of the imagination, become the most effective gold per hour endeavor in the game. To make “real money” with this, on the order of your typical daily dungeon rotation, you’d be doing 35+ different events in multiple zones over the course of quite a few hours. Which, if people wanted to do that, more power to them as they’d be playing the HECK out of Guild Wars 2, but this would not be the kind of economic upset you’re referencing, especially with the upcoming reduction in champion silver rewards.

It would be possible to also add some incentive to switch up zones. The kill-streak reward could diminish if you’ve done it in a zone earlier that week, so that if you want to keep adventuring and getting the kill-streak bonus, you would move through different maps throughout the week.

Along with the OP’s idea, I would also like to remind ArenaNet of the perennial suggestion to somehow reward infrequently done DEs and Champs. The content in the corners of the world where people rarely go should have dynamically adjusting rewards, so that players who choose to adventure off in search of the less travelled path will get rewarded for doing so. Imagine Tyria with a player base constantly looking for that Champion or DE that is rarely encountered.

Both awesome ideas as well. There is a lot of potential to tie “bonuses” into a system of this sort because it’s all centered around doing as much stuff you haven’t done before that day as possible. There could even be “Zone of the Day” type bonuses, Zaishen style, where you got a slightly higher rate, or an XP or karma multiplier with your streak in that zone too…

Not to mention, it’d be harder to chain DEs across an entire zone than it is to train Champs. There are more of them, so it’d be harder to come to an agreed consensus on order, and they have different states that are more unpredictable than “kill champ a, b, c and by the time you finish d, a will have respawned”. Some DEs cycle faster than others, some only happen after another DE has been completed or failed. Some DEs require triggering with an NPC.

I’m not saying it would be impossible to find ideal DE trains, but with the scope of trying to hit most or every DE in an entire zone, it would be more complicated, and therefore less efficient than simply jumping on a Champ train or well worn Orr DE train.

I don’t see it suddenly flooding the economy with gold.

We need collectors. So we can farm the kitten out of enemies to gather 250 stack of something, so we can buy chaos gloves and stuff. Like in original Guild Wars.

Sadly they’ve already decided to nerf the already meager coin rewards from events in the upcoming patch, so I don’t think Anet will agree with your idea at all.

I agree that we need better rewards for these things, but I think it would be better to suggest more tangible rewards than coin.

I remember a long time ago they added a bunch of new events and were happy to announce it because a lot of us were asking for it. However there was almost no feedback on the new content and Anet figured it meant nobody really cared and they should not bother adding any more.

Of course the real problem was that these things were and still are the least rewarding content in a game focused on grinding rewards.

risa.1382:

Sadly they’ve already decided to nerf the already meager coin rewards from events in the upcoming patch, so I don’t think Anet will agree with your idea at all.

I can’t follow you onto this limb, really. One imagines the nerf is primarily aimed at the champion loot trains. These activities currently incentivize running the same small handful of 5-7 events over and over again for limitless profit. My idea completely eliminates any (gold) benefit for repeating events altogther.

I agree that we need better rewards for these things, but I think it would be better to suggest more tangible rewards than coin.

I aimed for a degree of practicality. Stuff like unique skins for crossing a threshold for each zone or new achievment progression would involve a lot more work from more departments that just messing with the math that delivers event silver rewards.

I remember a long time ago they added a bunch of new events and were happy to announce it because a lot of us were asking for it. However there was almost no feedback on the new content and Anet figured it meant nobody really cared and they should not bother adding any more.

I saw that bit too and I was incredibly disturbed by the conclusion. Considered in purely pragmatic terms, how is a player supposed to know if an event is new or if they just haven’t seen it before? I know I haven’t done every event in the game; I probably haven’t even done every event in my favorite zone.

I wish GW2 had artifacts to find and collect like RIFT does. If they added this, it would make exploration more enjoyable and give a point to it once you’ve finished your maps.

Didn’t get through all the comments, but I love what I read from the OP.
A few tweaks are necessary, for balance, but I love it.

1. Stack limit. Get 25 stacks of the Area Hero buff for maximum rewards. Maybe even have the buff scale more sharply toward the top.
2. Find a way to give greater rewards to people in less populated zones. Suddenly, those mid-level zones will get a lot more love~
3. If not money, add +1% Magic/Gold Find as a buff while in the zone instead.

We need more rewarding event chains, too. End them in boss fights (Ulgoth) or unique vendors with gear skins (Arah, but less painful).

I really hope the devs see and act on this idea. I’ve been musing of ways to make open world and dynamic events more interesting again.

Shoot, you could add all different kinds of rewards for reaching thresholds, earning streaks, and participating….. even investing your time to explore(think that hidden pirate event in Lion’s Arch, fun and brilliant by the way)
Things like karma vendors with more unique items or skins for a piece of armor or weapons, titles, mats, gold, drop rates, recipes, are just a few ideas…..

what about the possibility of unlocking certain zones, like the skritt kindom?

I LOVE DE in GW2 and the examples I listed are just a few things that made the game shine and tremendously fun.

Max Lexandre.6279:

Another thing is the mats mobs drop at lower level maps, that are again, not rewarding as the normal 80lvl-farm maps, it should be possible to find a way to make them drop their mats depending of our level and not their levels.

If you need some wool and you only have level 80 characters, how you suppose to farm it this way? The drop rate is extremely low, but at least right now it is possible.

Max Lexandre.6279:

If there is already level requirements depending of the resource tier, i don’t see the reason to don’t spread them to make our exploration rewarding on all maps.

I see where you’re coming from, but from the perspective of a low level player, it would suck to run into mostly stuff you can’t gather… so I can see why they wouldn’t do this..

Posted something similar here wish I’d seen this post first.

I think the problem would be solved if Dynamic Events gets an unique currency (not karma, because other stuff gives it as well), and that currency gives you objectively desirable rewards.

I like this idea, but wouldn’t there also be nice if we could get something like dungeon tokens from completing events in an area that we can use to buy minipets and unique weapons/gear that you can only get with that areas token. Doing something like could give level 80 players a reason to go back to other areas of the game and do events.

Maybe they also could implement your idea into a guild mission where your guild get a random area and in that area all your guildmates get a big gold, karma and magic find boost for an hour or something giving your guild an fun aswell as rewarding activity.

Anyhow, your idea is something anet should take a look at if they haven’t already.

I spend a large amount of time just doing dynamic events. As of now, the only way to convince myself that I’m not “wasting my time” is to only do them in zones which have gathering materials that I need, and gather as I do the events.

Occasionally, I’ll run into an event that I’ve never encountered. It’s hard to describe how happy I am whenever I discover a new event. It’s sort of like when something big happens in the lore and your first thought is, “I bet they had to retcon something for this to fit in” and then when you look back, you realize that they had planned it all along!

I think introducing “eventing” as an end-game style of play would be awesome.