Guild Wars 2

Concise version : I think it is a good system but I don’t like the way it has been tailored, especially the interest vs reward aspect.

Giving players collections goals/subgoals is great as sooner or later that is all that matters in PvE. I love having these collections as a feeling of progression : I just did the same dungeons I did a month ago (before D3 break) and this time it felt like I was actually getting towards a goal, cool.

What I hate is how rewards can be off. A shiny example is the spoon collection : there’s a 40 laurels and 50 ecto spoon to collect (or 200 WvW tournament tickets) while the reward seems to be beginner stuff (from the description).

Now don’t get me wrong : it’s okay for skin unlock’s collection not to grant much because the skins are already a reward. But collections like spoons’ should pay for themselves and not just be another way to reap players’ resources for no good reason !

Another thing annoying me on the rewards is the profusion of common ascended materials : empyrean/bloodstone/dragonite/vision cristal are the easy part of ascended crafting and are currently the biggest storage issue as far as I’m concerned so please stop using these as a reward. I think anyone likely to complete collection will feel those rewards as a penalty, that’s how I feel about them anyway.

Karmic converter and personal instance chest are great rewards though, that’s the kind of stuff you should try to put on most collection rewards IMO.

Thoughts ?

Collection would even be a good idea without 2 huge mistakes that made them more offensive than interesting:

1) including rare exotic drops in them made speculators buy and relist for up to 30.000% something in most game is ban worthy but in this game is considered “perfect” and healthy. (long story)
That ruined most collections for most players.
The fact john Smith had also the gut to defend it made me lose the last bit of hope i had for a change.
This is the effect ot a broken system that he sees as “fantastic” so non TP manipulators and new players are deemed to live with it.
After all despite the increase the costs of items for real moneys is quite the same. The fact that Gold is losing any value doesn t matter.
This reminds me of Diablo3.

2) rewards…
Its a cosmetic game, just give us skins.
If design costs too much, just take some of the cheap good skins we have and change colour/add particle effects.

Worked for SAB and for TA skins.
A dungeon player won’t have much use of an ascended trinket if to get it you need 200+ dungeon runs.

Give me a choice of one of the same dungeon skins of another colour, its not so hard.
(or even better enable all skins of another colour in wardrobe+1 trasmutation stone… it would even push the need of trasmu stones)

TP manipulation being the most efficient PvE activity always saddens me but it’s another discussion. But the analogy with D3 is really accurate in that matter :/

I agree that skins would be a really fitting reward too. Not necessarily new skins but “exotic skin of choice” boxes should probably be a more common reward.

The more I think about it the more I find rewards to be really really underwhelming for most collections : those are one time rewards, no need to be shy about them. They should be around the same level of achievements rewards IMO.