Guild Wars 2

I won’t go too much in detail, as that would take to long. However I think that anyone who has played GW can agree that the rewards for “playing the game” were better than they are in GW2.

In turns of GW2 dungeons they nailed some points; dungeon armor and weapons by earning dungeon points. It failed however by making dungeon chests utterly messy. And the monster drops even more so. In comparison GW1 had excellent chest rewards, yes there was a certain rng aspect to it, nonetheless every dungeon chest had some unique drops for that specific dungeon, which gave you a good reason to visit a wide variety of dungeons, instead of just the one that is easy to earn gold in. And sometimes the monsters in that dungeon would also have a chance of dropping something specific.

This leads to the overall idea and play-experience of GW2. in GW2 we are supposedly meant to want to play the game, no grind etc. The issue is, at some point you stop seeking out events(aside from dragons / world bosses) because the rewards are so poor. I like to do events when I run through the world, but the issue lies in the rewards, if the event is not over by the time tequatl pops up, well then I’ll be leaving mid event. Because the reward for finishing this event will be a little bit of karma, and at best a champion loot bag or two, where I have to do some more rng. And if I am already rng’ing I might as well open a dragon chest.

Suggestions to dungeons: Scale difficulty, and add the GW dungeon parts.

Suggestions to “the world”: Rewards for finishing events should be better, maybe lock some specific drops to each event(obviously that would be an rng too) it could be anything from specific weapons or armor, it could be dungeon tokens towards the nearest dungeon, just a few. These rewards could also be given via mail upon completion of an event(in the form of a chest), from either the villagers or the orders or someone/some organization(whatever makes sense)

Further suggestions, make some monsters have an extremely low drop rate of some weapons or armor, or something. In gw we had phoenix blade, or ids amongst others. The point is, people would visit these areas, obviously they would become farming grounds, but it could help populate certain areas, and bring some rewards to clearing out monsters (issue with this is that there might be too many people flocking one area) in which case the drops could be certain (undertermined except by devs) areas of the maps, that way people would be all over the map, one map might have 4 zones with unique to each zone drop?

A few things OP – Guild Wars 2 isn’t a game where you don’t have to grind. The philosophy of GW2 is that you shouldn’t have to grind for gear that allows you to be viable.

Unique rewards are a cool and interesting solution to the loot system. The reason they’re not implemented is simple :

GW2 is gold-centric. In its effort to be an “inclusionist” experience GW2 wants most things to be available to most players – so mostly everything can be sold through the TP.
Thus items that could be rare and interesting as unique rewards are freely available to anyone with gold or a full credit card.

Another issue is that the few times they did implement unique account-bound rewards in the game they are governed not only by RNG but by abysmally low drop rates which honestly isn’t that great.

I understand wanting something to be unique – but gating it behind terrible RNG is not the way in my opinion. I’m talking of course about things like the Tequatl weapons or Fractal weapons.

These drop – but so rarely that you’ll most likely give up hunting for them before you get them.
Why? You can’t measure progress. I quested 8 months of daily fractals (min 5 runs/week – maximum 15) to get my Fractal Longbow. I did get it but the real problem is that whilst I hadn’t gotten it yet I was making no progress.
6 months into my search I was as far away as I had been on day 1 – as I had always been.

Unique rewards should be approached differently in my opinion – through a token system. Even if you make them very hard to obtain people will still have a sense of progress and a the whole process will have some form of predictability.

I’ve seen them test this out (or so I speculate) with Ambrite Weapons and the Bioluminescent armor skins – perhaps we’ll see more of this sort of system in the future – it would certainly be the best of both worlds in my opinion.

Harper.4173:

A few things OP – Guild Wars 2 isn’t a game where you don’t have to grind. The philosophy of GW2 is that you shouldn’t have to grind for gear that allows you to be viable.

This.

Adding to that, 70-80% of the skins and appearance items are dirt cheap. People just need to not focus on the most expensive ones.

It would be grinding for skins not something that would make your character viable, did I say that GW2 wasn’t a game with grind? if so I blame posting in the morning. And you can’t deny that if there was one area where getting some precursor was 2-3 times as high would make people farm it?
The systems could be implemented in a variety of ways, among others the same way ambrite weapons works, tokens etc, and account locking something. The post wasn’t so much to come up with the stellar example of what could and could not work, but simply reward idea that could make people want to venture outside of world boss etc. Because I essentially love the game world, but there is no real consequence if I don’t save the village or escort the merchant, if the village gets taken over it won’t affect tyrian trade, if the merchant dies, well who cares. The lack of consequence makes me shirk my duties as a tyrian hero, and spend my time in pvp. If there was consequence I would come back, but as that is highly unlikely to happen at this point, well the simplest solution I could think of was a reward system that was worth the time and effort.

I will never be one to laud the item system of Guild Wars, as that was honestly one of the things I hated about the game, but I will agree that some sort of change here would be good.

Harper.4173:

I understand wanting something to be unique – but gating it behind terrible RNG is not the way in my opinion. I’m talking of course about things like the Tequatl weapons or Fractal weapons.

These drop – but so rarely that you’ll most likely give up hunting for them before you get them.
Why? You can’t measure progress. I quested 8 months of daily fractals (min 5 runs/week – maximum 15) to get my Fractal Longbow. I did get it but the real problem is that whilst I hadn’t gotten it yet I was making no progress.
6 months into my search I was as far away as I had been on day 1 – as I had always been.

Unique rewards should be approached differently in my opinion – through a token system. Even if you make them very hard to obtain people will still have a sense of progress and a the whole process will have some form of predictability.

The problem with a token system is that while you know it will never take you longer than ‘X’ to get something, you also no it will never take you LESS time than X to get it, making all the intermediate progress a slog. A hybrid system where you could get it as a drop earlier OR get it via tokens could work, but that’s rarely done in my experience.

While I don’t approve of heavy RNG for things that take forever and give you relatively few chances(world boss drops, dungeon end chests, etc.) getting rid of it entirely just means that you’ve got no chance for a fun surprise while playing. And a pure token-based system turns the game even more into a job as you just collect your paycheck until you can buy your goods.

Harper.4173:

A few things OP – Guild Wars 2 isn’t a game where you don’t have to grind. The philosophy of GW2 is that you shouldn’t have to grind for gear that allows you to be viable.

The philosophy, according to ANet, is/was that you shouldnt have to grind for gear that provides any statistical advantage.

I think the purpose of not having specific loot like that in specific dungeons means not forcing people to do something they don’t like for something they want.

I can’t tell you how many times I ran Bogroot Growths in Guild Wars 1 for a Frog Scepter. Easily a couple of hundred times. I never got one. Okay I enjoyed the dungeon anyway, but the point is, if I wanted that, I ran that dungeon. That is against the philosophy in Guild Wars 2.

I suppose if they make all that stuff sellable, it wouldn’t matter much, but there is a reason it wasn’t done.

Vayne.8563:

I think the purpose of not having specific loot like that in specific dungeons means not forcing people to do something they don’t like for something they want.

I can’t tell you how many times I ran Bogroot Growths in Guild Wars 1 for a Frog Scepter. Easily a couple of hundred times. I never got one. Okay I enjoyed the dungeon anyway, but the point is, if I wanted that, I ran that dungeon. That is against the philosophy in Guild Wars 2.

I suppose if they make all that stuff sellable, it wouldn’t matter much, but there is a reason it wasn’t done.

This.

I think that a bit more of a mix between content specific loot vs general would suit my tastes slightly better but I understand and approve of their reasoning for the current approach.

usernameisapain.7163:

I won’t go too much in detail, as that would take to long. However I think that anyone who has played GW can agree that the rewards for “playing the game” were better than they are in GW2.

I cannot disagree more strongly. In GW1, rares were even more rare than they are now: three of us could do three vanquishes and end up with three rares between us and, even during double-chance-of-named-weapon weekends, we still wouldn’t see any ‘greens’.

In order to use ‘trophies’ to get weapons, you’d have to scour the wiki to figure out which items could be traded for the weapons you wanted with the stats you wanted, too. Sometimes the drop rate was good, but often it was terrible and so required repeating the same farm over and over and over again.

Worse, if you did get a ‘great’ drop, often you couldn’t use the reward (since it didn’t fit your character or build). To get value for it, you’d have to sit in a trading town for potentially hours, instead of being able to play.

Frankly, if I had played GW1 for the ‘rewards’, I would have stopped after the first month.

UW –
2 Unique Miniatures
Unique Scythe “skin”
Unique Sword “skin”

FoW
Unique Sword “skin”

Urgoz
Unique Weapon “skins”

The Deep

Unique Weapon “skins”

DoA -

Unique Weapon “skins” – Armbraces (was also a currency)

Honestly, if each dungeon or fractal had something special to drop in it then maybe we’d flock to dungeons more than just #dungeoneer#needgold ;/

ANet is still experimenting with rewards. Some of the suggestions I see in this thread have been implemented.

• Rewards for DE completion rather than mob drops: see SW
• Area unique items: see LS S2 areas DT and SW
• Token plus drops for item rewards: see SW Carapace armor

One problem is that players are expected to “want” to play the whole game, including content that’s been around since launch, but the new reward experiments are only in the newer content. It’s unlikely there will be a revamp of rewards in the older content.

GW drops were both similar and different than GW2’s.

1. GW drops were more rare — at least the desirable ones. They were valuable, not because they were more common, but because they were less common. With some exceptions, items in GW2 are as common as dirt, and their sell value is in low single digit gold, if not silver. Some items in GW were so valuable the the 100G cap on gold transfer meant that trades for such items were done in ectos, worth 5-6k+ gold per, stacked to 250, and multiple stacks could be (and were) exchanged for 1 item.
2. GW drops were all sellable. GW2 uses Account Bound (a lot, it seems) to keep the extremely rare stuff from becoming high-price items on the TP. This limits the pool of items that one can get and make a lot of gold from selling.
3. Collecting stuff to make rare stuff in GW was limited to a few armor skins — Obsidian and Vabbi, for the most part). In GW2, collecting stuff to make stuff nets the lion’s share of valuable items, with many of the exceptions being account bound. The only big-ticket items that come up on these boards are precursors. In HoT, players will be “collecting” whatever “currency” the crafting Mastery system requires to make precursors. Also, the new Legendaries will be account bound.
4. In GW, acquisition of gold allowed players to buy ultra-rare/desirable items from other players. These items were mostly gained through RNG, the only exception I can think of were the “currency” items in DoA. In GW2, most items are gained via gold.
5. In GW, Rare items (the category, colored yellow) dropped with something close to the frequency that Rare items dropped here. In GW, they had many uses. They were max-tier, and many of them had max stats, so they could be used by players or put on Heroes. They could also be salvaged for points towards a title. In GW2, Rare items are two tiers down, and are useless for anything but salvage for ectos or used/sold for the MF on the pie-in-the-sky chance to get a Precursor.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

usernameisapain.7163:

I won’t go too much in detail, as that would take to long. However I think that anyone who has played GW can agree that the rewards for “playing the game” were better than they are in GW2.

I cannot disagree more strongly. In GW1, rares were even more rare than they are now: three of us could do three vanquishes and end up with three rares between us and, even during double-chance-of-named-weapon weekends, we still wouldn’t see any ‘greens’.

In order to use ‘trophies’ to get weapons, you’d have to scour the wiki to figure out which items could be traded for the weapons you wanted with the stats you wanted, too. Sometimes the drop rate was good, but often it was terrible and so required repeating the same farm over and over and over again.

Worse, if you did get a ‘great’ drop, often you couldn’t use the reward (since it didn’t fit your character or build). To get value for it, you’d have to sit in a trading town for potentially hours, instead of being able to play.

Frankly, if I had played GW1 for the ‘rewards’, I would have stopped after the first month.

Rares were BiS gear in GW1. Ascended is BiS in GW2. Rares in GW2 are two steps down from BiS. So, to compare GW1 rare drop rates to GW2’s equivalent you would need to use ascended. I doubt very much that three players playing for approximately three hours (assuming an hour per vanquish) would get three ascended between them. I know that I have had a total of two ascended drops in over two years of play (neither of which was of any use to my characters).

Now if you are going to compare GW2 rares to their GW1 counterpart (again two steps down from BiS) you need to use GW1 blue gear, which was very common.

Dark Saviour.9410:

I will never be one to laud the item system of Guild Wars, as that was honestly one of the things I hated about the game, but I will agree that some sort of change here would be good.

Harper.4173:

I understand wanting something to be unique – but gating it behind terrible RNG is not the way in my opinion. I’m talking of course about things like the Tequatl weapons or Fractal weapons.

These drop – but so rarely that you’ll most likely give up hunting for them before you get them.
Why? You can’t measure progress. I quested 8 months of daily fractals (min 5 runs/week – maximum 15) to get my Fractal Longbow. I did get it but the real problem is that whilst I hadn’t gotten it yet I was making no progress.
6 months into my search I was as far away as I had been on day 1 – as I had always been.

Unique rewards should be approached differently in my opinion – through a token system. Even if you make them very hard to obtain people will still have a sense of progress and a the whole process will have some form of predictability.

The problem with a token system is that while you know it will never take you longer than ‘X’ to get something, you also no it will never take you LESS time than X to get it, making all the intermediate progress a slog. A hybrid system where you could get it as a drop earlier OR get it via tokens could work, but that’s rarely done in my experience.

While I don’t approve of heavy RNG for things that take forever and give you relatively few chances(world boss drops, dungeon end chests, etc.) getting rid of it entirely just means that you’ve got no chance for a fun surprise while playing. And a pure token-based system turns the game even more into a job as you just collect your paycheck until you can buy your goods.

Actually a long time ago I proposed a hybrid token-RNG system which worked in summary like this :

You get tokens – but the tokens are RNG. No less than 1 per run but anywhere between 1 and 3. Or 1 and 5.

It would take let’s say 150 of them for a really really unique and prestigious skin.

So it would take you at the very least 30 runs and at most 150. With a lot of RNG in between – but even in the worst case scenario – 150 runs – you still get the skin.

The reason I feel this system would be the best one is because it gives you that steady satisfaction of working towards an attainable goal while still providing that “omg got a good drop” buzz players want.

Ashen.2907:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

usernameisapain.7163:

I won’t go too much in detail, as that would take to long. However I think that anyone who has played GW can agree that the rewards for “playing the game” were better than they are in GW2.

I cannot disagree more strongly. In GW1, rares were even more rare than they are now: three of us could do three vanquishes and end up with three rares between us and, even during double-chance-of-named-weapon weekends, we still wouldn’t see any ‘greens’.

In order to use ‘trophies’ to get weapons, you’d have to scour the wiki to figure out which items could be traded for the weapons you wanted with the stats you wanted, too. Sometimes the drop rate was good, but often it was terrible and so required repeating the same farm over and over and over again.

Worse, if you did get a ‘great’ drop, often you couldn’t use the reward (since it didn’t fit your character or build). To get value for it, you’d have to sit in a trading town for potentially hours, instead of being able to play.

Frankly, if I had played GW1 for the ‘rewards’, I would have stopped after the first month.

Rares were BiS gear in GW1. Ascended is BiS in GW2. Rares in GW2 are two steps down from BiS. So, to compare GW1 rare drop rates to GW2’s equivalent you would need to use ascended. I doubt very much that three players playing for approximately three hours (assuming an hour per vanquish) would get three ascended between them. I know that I have had a total of two ascended drops in over two years of play (neither of which was of any use to my characters).

Now if you are going to compare GW2 rares to their GW1 counterpart (again two steps down from BiS) you need to use GW1 blue gear, which was very common.

Naw, rares in GW1 are equivalent to exotics here. I get exotics far more frequently in GW2 than rares in GW1. There is no equivalent to ‘ascended’ in GW1, because there was no slot above “the rarity around which the game was balanced.” Further, ‘ascended’ items aren’t tradeable, as rares or even greens were in GW1.

In GW1, I did dungeons and vanquishes far, far more often than I do the equivalent here and I never, ever got the special drops coveted by so many. Even my friend, who we teased about being uber-lucky (if we got 5 rares in a run, he would get 4)…even he never got those drops.

Put another way, without special farming and power trading, I never would have gotten more than 2-3 of my toons fully kitted and certainly wouldn’t have had any luxuries. In GW2, I only have to work hard for the highest-end luxuries; generic-looking full gear is easily acquired.

So, from my point of view, the rewards in GW2 are far better than in GW1.

Crystallize.8603:

UW –
2 Unique Miniatures
Unique Scythe “skin”
Unique Sword “skin”

FoW
Unique Sword “skin”

Urgoz
Unique Weapon “skins”

The Deep

Unique Weapon “skins”

DoA -

Unique Weapon “skins” – Armbraces (was also a currency)

Honestly, if each dungeon or fractal had something special to drop in it then maybe we’d flock to dungeons more than just #dungeoneer#needgold ;/

As long as its not behind some crazy RNG. We all seen what happened to TA aether path when people found out the chances at those skins are abysmal.

I still miss Z Keys. Such a constant reliable source of dosh. I also hate how they did away with the collection economy with mini petz.

Crystallize.8603:

UW –
2 Unique Miniatures
Unique Scythe “skin”
Unique Sword “skin”

FoW
Unique Sword “skin”

Urgoz
Unique Weapon “skins”

The Deep

Unique Weapon “skins”

DoA -

Unique Weapon “skins” – Armbraces (was also a currency)

Honestly, if each dungeon or fractal had something special to drop in it then maybe we’d flock to dungeons more than just #dungeoneer#needgold ;/

I thought each dungeon in Guild Wars 2 had 3 unique sets of armor and a full set of unique weapons, all gained through a token system.

In the other threads I’ve seen it’s been complaints about RNG drops, such as the fractal weapons through RNG and not a token method of getting them.