Guild Wars 2

Whilst sitting on the toilet, I sometimes get idea’s: today was on of those days.

The thing with GW2 hearts, is that they are short, boring quests that ask us to do a certain thing. Collect coconuts, kill these wasps, what ever. They’re boring… uninteresting and when GW2 was hyped all the way to Mars, I honestly though these “hearts” would be an adventure on their own.

This is what they should be, though. So I’m suggesting a way for Arenanet to give the game, the following:

- Interesting story lines
- More engaging contents
- People actually wanting to complete hearts instead of grinding them to just get over it
- An easy way to add more content to the game

Now, you might wonder, how could this happen? Simple: link hearts in lore, content and story. (check the attachment)

Two story lines now exist in Sparkfly Fen: The red and green one. The red one is relatively short and consists out of 5 steps, the green one out of 8.

Example for red: A hoard of undead minions are preparing an attack on the Zintl village. In 5 “heart” quests, the player discovers how this particular group of undeads are organising theirselves, how they plan on attacking, and how the player can stop them. A short storyline that gives new lore and information, with some minor personalities that give it a personal feel.

Example for green: The Stone of Hazaan, a mysterious remnant of an ancient temple, draws the undead to it. Discover why it does this, and what or who Hazaan was. In 8 steps, you can discover lore on the Stone of Hazaan, understand what makes it eminate power and discover how to use this power to defeat the hoard of undead that it has drawn.

It’s a simple and elegant proposition: it will only take some development time to implement but good god, how this would make the game much, MUCH more interesting! I would personally be up all night, playing through the different storylines and discovering the lore of the world, because at the moment, I have no kittening idea of why the Stone of Hazaan is a place of power. Just imagine the potential this method of working with hearts could give Arenanet to the players.

The lore in this game is abyssmally unreachable. You only get lore through some skill points, a few shady dialogue options with NPC’s and the personal storyline. Why not make lore a more intrinsic part of this game? At the moment, collecting A and killing B is just boring the living cats out of me. Could you imagine how new players or even veterans feel when they have to do this for the 2nd or 3th time?

Please give me your thoughts. Of course, having a member of the Arena Net developer team to answer would be even better.. (yeah right, keep wishing Derigar)

Well Derigar regardless of how you came up with the suggestion, I think it’s a good one. I am personally bored to tears with the heart quests. They have never been interesting, and I’ve done them all at least 3 times or more now. I also have no idea of the lore of the game, so I think your ideas are a good way to actually make new players interested in it.

Regardless of whether or not the idea gets implemented, I thank you for throwing it out their for consideration.

Hearts were only ever meant to be a way to lure people near where events occur. They don’t need to be “fun,” they aren’t intended to be main attractions.

Kal Spiro.9745:

Hearts were only ever meant to be a way to lure people near where events occur. They don’t need to be “fun,” they aren’t intended to be main attractions.

LOL

You’re DEFENDING boring content? Are you drunk?

Derigar.7810:

LOL

You’re DEFENDING boring content? Are you drunk?

Boring or fun content is a matter of opinion. Some hearts I actually do enjoy (unless I’m trying to burn map completion). The fun ones also tend to be the ones that aren’t extremely slow, I enjoy a lot of the bloodtide coast ones, and alot of the hrathi hinterlands one are prety good.

The problem is ones like turn into a cat and chase animals out of bushes, that takes FOREVER to complete due to low progress gains per action, another one that I just loath is the collect metal to the east of the city in FoR.

They wont be re-worked, because they aren’t part of the game’s future. ie they aren’t making more hearts in the new zones. Partly because they weren’t overly popular, but also the static nature of them isn’t in line with the “dynamic” or “living” aspect to the world they are evolving.

Now, it can be argued that fixes like yours could change that. Quite possibly it could, but investing resources into revamping “vanilla” content is highly unlikely, especially considering the time and workload the devs generally have at any one time.

It’s probably going to be chalked up to one of those cool things that would be nice to be changed, but never will. If I’m proved wrong, I wont be unhappy tho.

You’re right Randulf… It would be silly of me to think they’d rework existing, functional content solely on the basis of turning it more interesting.

I’m wondering though, would it change their mind if it would attract new players a lot more easily?

Please don’t we will just have something like the current trait system; tedious boring stuff that is bugged. Map completion on alts would be even less fun.
How about some extra quests which can be done voluntarily and not hearts?

Derigar.7810:

You’re right Randulf… It would be silly of me to think they’d rework existing, functional content solely on the basis of turning it more interesting.

I’m wondering though, would it change their mind if it would attract new players a lot more easily?

A-net has reworked or changed some content. Honestly from the NPE changes it seems they would rather repel new players. Look at how the game was at release for starting up, wide open, lots of options, fairly comfortable trait point gain, no massive trait quests or sinks. Now look at the NPE, it’s a huge step in the wrong direction for appealing to new players.

Tl;DR Say yes to good changes that might engage and attract new players but NO to dancing for cows…

Hearts don’t need to be reworked, but the open world needs proper rewards.

There’s only a handful of worthwhile items gained from completing hearts. Stuff like the Jotun greatsword, for example.

Derigar.7810:

You’re right Randulf… It would be silly of me to think they’d rework existing, functional content solely on the basis of turning it more interesting.

I’m wondering though, would it change their mind if it would attract new players a lot more easily?

Well yes, but i cant see heart revamps attracting more players than new content. Or adding in LW1 back in. Or a better NPE (or the original one). A revamp would benefit people with alts more than new players.

Do you have any idea how much work you’re suggesting to add story lines and “engaging content” to all the hearts? It’s certainly more than “some development time.” They’ve looking to the new maps and the new Living Story in those areas now. They’re not going to stop what they’re doing to go back and rework old content. They’ve already said they are stretched to the limit right now with what they’re trying to do. After this they will hopefully be working on the next expansion.

I think adding story would not work very well with the existing heart structure. First, there is no need to talk to anyone to complete a heart, and no reason for players to think they should bother this one time unlike in the dozens of other hearts. Second, there is no way to ensure players do hearts in any particular order. Level is no guarantee even without downscaling and is meaningless to level 40s in a 25-35 zone.

I do think hearts should be reworked somehow, or at any rate some kind of open world activity besides events should be introduced. However, this should not be a revamp of old zones but rather part of new zones. The expansion seems to be nothing more than a few level 80 “What if Cursed Shore and Silverwastes had a baby?” areas. This is baffling to me. The best thing about the Silverwastes is that people are always doing the Silverwastes. If there are 4-6 zones that are all similar, will that still be true? How many people are still in Dry Top, anyway? That’s with just two of the new style zones.

Does the game really need several more of those? Does it need more level 80 zones period? Not only is there a new profession coming, and not only do many players delight more in making alts (and buying slots) than doing level cap content, but also the downscaling system means lower level zones are still usable by 80s. Creating new (and better, one hopes) leveling zones can be far more effective than piling on event-only cap zones.

As it is, hearts seem to be unloved by players and developers, judging by their abandonment. Some of the problems are:
- While across all hearts there is a variety of activities, each heart feels repetitive.
- While across all hearts there are many and varied rewards, a given heart probably offers nothing to the person doing it (who gives up even checking before long).
- Each heart has its own NPCs with their own text, but the sheer number of them soon discourages players from talking to them or paying attention to the story behind the heart.
- Hearts theoretically guide players to events, but there are only so many events and many of them are far away from hearts (often too far to show up on the minimap).
- Heart completion bonuses discourage players from participating in events that take them away from the hearts even though those events are designed to move them around the zone in an organic, fun way.

My own suggestion is simple: Mega Hearts. Many of these problems can be ameliorated by heart consolidation. A new zone has 2-5 hearts rather than 10-20. Each heart covers a large part of the zone. All events taking place within its area are visible to all players within it, and mobile events go to locations within the heart, which for a given heart includes different sorts of areas (such as field, forest, town, etc.) Each heart can be filled by methods taken from multiple of the old hearts. Each heart has a full set of rewards: Rather than offering a bad amulet, two cooking ingredients, a soup recipe, and a pistol, one heart in the zone might have all the ingredients and recipes for level 100-200 tradeskills while another has complete armor and weapon sets for levels 15-25. The rewards are themed for the locations they cover, so there could be a bazaar heart that offers toys and consumables while a fort in the same zone has armor.

In order to keep players interested but not overwhelmed, Mega Hearts have multiple completion levels. For example, filling it once gives white and green gear, twice blue gear with upgrades installed, thrice higher level gear, etc. At higher completion ranks, the NPCs have different text and allow players to start different events. Eventually these changes cap out, but the hearts can still be refilled and give some kind of bonus for each completion, much like PvP reward tracks.

The idea is to offer players more condensed content and rewards which encourage them to pay attention to where they are and what they are doing rather than bouncing from heart to heart (or event to event) for xp and karma while complaining when one takes a little longer than usual. People would still do that, of course, including me, but the objective here is to maximize happiness, not minimize unhappiness. Ideally, players would develop some fondness for hearts they spent a lot of time in and from which they took many rewards they liked, and even revisit them and hang out with other players while doing events. and such.

That’s my little idea, but in any case I am convinced level 80 events alone are not a good way to expand the game and that the main problem with hearts is the amount of them.

Well I can’t argue with less hearts. In fact, no heart quests at all would be preferrable. The zones I enjoyed mapping were those without hearts. What more needs to even be said? But I can hear the cacophany of mad voices already… WE HAD TO DO HEARTS FOR MAP COMPLETION SO EVEYONE ELSE SHOULD FOR ALL ETERNITY!!!!

Heart quests IMHO are obnoxiously boring as they are.

Too many hearts to do anything about it now guys. Just be glad they aren’t including them in HoT. They’re being replaced with Adventures so that should be interesting.

I know that there was way more hearts in the works when the base game went beta. So to give hearts more flavor, I’d like it if they would rotate hearts out and put new ones in every month or so. A little variety never hurt, I know when they replaced some hearts in the starting zone, I was mildly content/surprised and a bit interested in those zones for just a moment. Only a moment though, for as long as it took me to find out it was only 5 hearts that was changed.

Kal Spiro.9745:

Hearts were only ever meant to be a way to lure people near where events occur. They don’t need to be “fun,” they aren’t intended to be main attractions.

I think that anything included in a medium which exists for the sake of being fun (and making a profit off of people willing to pay to have fun) should probably be fun.

That said, I know that some people consider hearts to be fun. Nothing will be fun for everyone.

Kal Spiro.9745:

Hearts were only ever meant to be a way to lure people near where events occur. They don’t need to be “fun,” they aren’t intended to be main attractions.

HUH?

Most events have a pretty well-defined script and are not exactly exciting. I would not call them a main attraction!

Derigar.7810:

Kal Spiro.9745:

Hearts were only ever meant to be a way to lure people near where events occur. They don’t need to be “fun,” they aren’t intended to be main attractions.

LOL

You’re DEFENDING boring content? Are you drunk?

I’m not defending anything. I’m saying the proposed “improvements” have nothing to do with the purpose of the heart system, and I’d prefer they use their time on something more meaningful.

Menadena.7482:

HUH?

Most events have a pretty well-defined script and are not exactly exciting. I would not call them a main attraction!

Then I’m sorry for you, your time in GW2 must be pretty dull, because the dynamic event system and the events that are therefore associated with it is absolutely a main attraction in this game.

it would be awesome, if ANet would rework them and would make them all finally REDOABLE as often as you like to make them after your first time doing them more rewarding based on how far you are progressed with your Character, so that also especially the Karma rewards become more useful for you so further you progress with your character, that their reward lists become bigger, so more you progress in the game and so more you repeat successfully the renowm hearts, so that those hearts are just a do once and forget content, like they are now since release date.

Anet should also constantly significantly increase the amount of dynamic events of all maps, so that the super old ones get slowly replaced with new dynamic events to make the old ones appear slowly lesser and lesser often/ so quickly, so that you get really the impression, that not everything around you repeats itself every freaking 5 minutes!!
All maps currently have way too less dynamic events for that.
Anet would lierally have to double on all maps the amount of dynamic events, so that all events that we know now sicne game release and have done already all countless of times that its uncountable already, don#t repeat itself so fast and often anymore.
Thats a process, that ANet should have done from begin on to give dynamic events a higher priority and to add with every patch here and there always also some new dynamic events to increase the amount of events to make them rarer happening over time.
But ANet did nothing at all about this, except their few living world patchs, that changed in some places some dynamic events but stopped doing that with season 2 mostly completely.
They need to do this constantly, otherwise will become all older maps quickly total wastelands in which you will see sporadically maybe sometimes some newbies running around, but veterans only, if theres currently some kind of world boss spawning, but otherwise there is no reason to return to the older maps, because you have done everythign in them already thousands of times, cause the same 3 year old dynamic events keep on repeatign themself every 5 minutes.
Thats somethign that needs to get changed too to make all maps constantly interesting enough so that players want to revisit them also, due to beign able to find some new dynamic events, that you have never played before which might have been implemented into the game as Stealth Content via Patch or could be found in the maos as part of some new living world content, that changes the map.

I know, that players will always rush through new content quicker, than new content can be designed and implemented, but as a player you could at least expect a little bit more from dynamic events to be not so extremely repetitive after 3 years, that Anet did so little to nearly nothing to reduce this repetitiveness over the time.

As to them adding new dynamic events, I don’t see them doing that either. They did add a few new events a long time ago. Apparently no one noticed them (not surprising as people who ran into them probably thought they were old events they had never encountered before). This lack of response seems to have discouraged them from making new events. There was a red post a long time ago commenting on the lack of response from the players to the new events they put in. Shortly after this, they started the Living Story.

Imo, they aren’t going to rework hearts or add new dynamic events. They’ve changed the focus of the game from dynamic events to the living story and that’s where they are putting in the work.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

As to them adding new dynamic events, I don’t see them doing that either. They did add a few new events a long time ago. Apparently no one noticed them (not surprising as people who ran into them probably thought they were old events they had never encountered before). This lack of response seems to have discouraged them from making new events. There was a red post a long time ago commenting on the lack of response from the players to the new events they put in. Shortly after this, they started the Living Story.

Imo, they aren’t going to rework hearts or add new dynamic events. They’ve changed the focus of the game from dynamic events to the living story and that’s where they are putting in the work.

You’re not really the most optimistic person in the world, are you?

Some time ago I saw a suggestion for making hearts into adventures i.e. making them repeatable and giving them leaderboards. I think that would be a decent way to go without taking too much resources to develop.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

As to them adding new dynamic events, I don’t see them doing that either. They did add a few new events a long time ago. Apparently no one noticed them (not surprising as people who ran into them probably thought they were old events they had never encountered before). This lack of response seems to have discouraged them from making new events. There was a red post a long time ago commenting on the lack of response from the players to the new events they put in. Shortly after this, they started the Living Story.

Yeah, I remember that, it struck me as very odd. For a start it was about a month in and they added a handful of new events to a couple of new zones, didn’t mention them in any patch notes and were then surprised (and apparently a little put out) that people didn’t notice them and then come to the forums to praise them.

As you said I and most others wouldn’t have a clue about whether or not an event was new at that stage of the games life: quietly adding a random event to a random zone and expecting people who encounter it to somehow sense its “newness” (from that “new event smell” maybe?) seems unrealistic to me.

That said, adding dynamic events and letting people know that you’ve added them seems like a good idea to me, they’ve done it several times in the LS (look at the events they added to Kessex Hills for the Toxic Alliance, for example).

Pifil.5193:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

As to them adding new dynamic events, I don’t see them doing that either. They did add a few new events a long time ago. Apparently no one noticed them (not surprising as people who ran into them probably thought they were old events they had never encountered before). This lack of response seems to have discouraged them from making new events. There was a red post a long time ago commenting on the lack of response from the players to the new events they put in. Shortly after this, they started the Living Story.

Yeah, I remember that, it struck me as very odd. For a start it was about a month in and they added a handful of new events to a couple of new zones, didn’t mention them in any patch notes and were then surprised (and apparently a little put out) that people didn’t notice them and then come to the forums to praise them.

As you said I and most others wouldn’t have a clue about whether or not an event was new at that stage of the games life: quietly adding a random event to a random zone and expecting people who encounter it to somehow sense its “newness” (from that “new event smell” maybe?) seems unrealistic to me.

That said, adding dynamic events and letting people know that you’ve added them seems like a good idea to me, they’ve done it several times in the LS (look at the events they added to Kessex Hills for the Toxic Alliance, for example).

Pretty much this.

At the time the new events were added I would have had no idea that they were new rather than just events I hadn’t previously encountered.

Derigar.7810:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

As to them adding new dynamic events, I don’t see them doing that either. They did add a few new events a long time ago. Apparently no one noticed them (not surprising as people who ran into them probably thought they were old events they had never encountered before). This lack of response seems to have discouraged them from making new events. There was a red post a long time ago commenting on the lack of response from the players to the new events they put in. Shortly after this, they started the Living Story.

Imo, they aren’t going to rework hearts or add new dynamic events. They’ve changed the focus of the game from dynamic events to the living story and that’s where they are putting in the work.

You’re not really the most optimistic person in the world, are you?

Call me pragmatic.

To rework all the hearts and to start adding dynamic events means they would have to use their limited Dev hours on this. This isn’t some minor change. It’s a major amount of rework and a shift in focus. It would take a lot of work to do what is suggested in these posts and it would mean they would be looking at content in the old world and not content in the new maps. Every indication so far to me says they are looking forward to the new areas and designing new content for that, not back to the vanilla maps, which are an extended leveling area now.

I’d give you a lengthy post about why I agree with this post and why I disagree with the people who think hearts should be boring and monotonous. But.. I won’t. So here is my +1 for this topic, I certainly agree that hearts should be more engaging.. I have map comp on ONE character, I refuse to do it on any other.. Simply because the content is just a bit too repetitive to me. (Note I don’t make legendaries, so there is no drive to complete it again.)

There are hundreds of hearts. They cant be that diferent. Btw there are lot of very interesting hearts

Some hearts were pretty fun, especially the more unique ones – which bordered on mini-games.

Does every map need twenty hearts? Not necessarily but it would be nice if every map had 1 or 2 “borderline mini-games” in it – which would be best represented on the map as a heart.

The char heart where you have to stealthily sneak through an ash legion camp is really fun. Can it be frustrating? Hell yes! If you bad at it you could have to repeat the game twenty times. But after 20 times you would still get the heart for showing up – you’d just get the heart in one round if you good at it.

Seeing as the upcoming maps are multi-leveled, mushroom springing, hand-gliding labyrinths, I’m really hoping for a “borderline mini-game” where you have to deliver battlefield communicants from one spot on the map to very distant locations in a short time frame – this should be represented on map and for completion sake as a heart.

As for whether there should be twenty hearts, what exactly are meant to replace them to represent map completion. Hearts provide a way of making people perform varied activities in exchange for a large reward and eventually gifts of exploration – and those are the only reasons one would actually bother with hearts. People seem to be suggesting that you shouldn’t need to put in so much effort and be forced to partake in distance locked (slightly varied) activities for these rewards. find these views to be silly.

There will be few or no hearts going forward. If anyone can suggest a way which maintains the effort associated with the rewards on the old maps, which can be implemented without much work on Anet’s side, then by all means do away with hearts.

If you feel you should be able to to grind closely packed mobs in the corner of a map until some mega-heart fills up, then kindly join a shovel train in the silverwastes, and stay there until you can buy your legendary straight off the market.

McWolfy.5924:

There are hundreds of hearts. They cant be that diferent. Btw there are lot of very interesting hearts

There’s lots of grindy hearts that are just plain boring to do. You feel meaningless doing these as you know you learn nothing about the world, and they will still have the same problem is you visit them 30 minutes later…

Derigar.7810:

Kal Spiro.9745:

Hearts were only ever meant to be a way to lure people near where events occur. They don’t need to be “fun,” they aren’t intended to be main attractions.

LOL

You’re DEFENDING boring content? Are you drunk?

If you think “directed questing” is fun, I beg to differ. Nothing is ‘fun’ about having to go kill X twenty times for a reward you will only use until the next quest..which is less than five feet away.

Spiro’s right though. The REAL experience is not the hearts but the nearby events that occur and this seems to be the real purpose: get and keep players in the world so they can participate in those events.

I like the idea, but you are mixing up heart quests with events.

What you discribed are multistep event chains which are already ingame. I’m not for copying content which is already present.

Heart quests were always designed as:
1.) oh I stumbled across a heart quest (much like traditional quests in other MMOs)
2.) oh the heart quest gives me 2-4 different ways to fill up the bar (unlike traditional MMOs where you HAVE to kill those 20 rats)
3.) heart quest done, oh whats that? An event? Let’s check that out
4.) event/eventchain done, oh whats that, another heart quest? (repeat from step 1)

As it stands heart quests are your traditional quests from other MMOs with multiple ways to complete them. Nothing more, nothing less. They fullfill their designed role.