Hello, I’ve recently had an interesting concept that I think would be great for GW2 and the long-term health of the game. And while I know my suggestion is probably meaningless, I’d love to hear the ideas others have in relation to mine.
As a player who’s been active since launch day and chasing virtual rewards ever since, I often like to think how the GW2 reward system could be improved and how to add incentives to content that’s otherwise ’’dead’’.
So one of the concepts I’ve been toying around with recently in my head is the idea of a ‘’quest stone’’ like item. The basic idea behind it would be; you activate it, it sends you to a seemingly random place on the world map and once you arrive there, an event activates, or, if the event is already active you participate in it. After the event is done you’d receive a guaranteed reward (worst case scenario, a rare and a few blues/greens).
An item like this would ’’force’’ you to constantly travel around the world, keep moving and do so with a purpose.
When would these items be obtained?
-after gaining a mastery level
-leveling up after all masteries are complete
-guaranteed drop at the end of a dungeon/fractal/raid boss (in an amount that’s appropriate for the time/effort invested, example; cof p1 gives 1, arah p2 gives 3)
-chance from dungeon chests
-world bosses( in accordance with their difficulty)
-completion of meta events such as DS
-capturing wvw objectives
-spvp reward track milestones
-rare drop from any monster
-rare drop open world chests
Why not just give the reward?
Well, this could result in a far more engaging and varied experience. Just think about what your average day could look like; you log in, do a world boss, a few dungeons, fractal dailies after which you could complete all of your ‘’quest stones’’ for additional rewards and hopefully get a return on the additional time invested. An item like this could potentially revitalize a lot of content (especially dungeons and the vanilla open world).
How would players be guided?
Simple, you’ve got the content guide arrow in the upper right corner and an orange star could be placed over the designated area on the map/minimap. Interacting with the stone would activate and deactivate the content guide/orange star.
The biggest problem with quest stones though, is that the concept is not really that compatable with DT, SW and HoT zones because everything is so heavily linked and most of the events are chain events that heavily depend on a timer (thus, cannot be activated randomly). The best solution to this problem is ofc to make them a great way of gathering the stones. Again, this would ensure a healthy rotation between vanilla and HoT zones, making sure that players don’t get bored of either one of those and are constantly changing their environment and activities.
Of course, the quest zones do not necessarily have to have an objective tied to vanilla events. They could act as secondary dailies and have objectives such as; use a vista or do a quick jumping puzzle. Ideally, developers could actively update the quest stone objectives to push players into areas that otherwise do not see a lot of player activity.
Additionally, the quest stones could receive a more complex mechanism that ties into their rarity, for example:
fine -gather certain raw materials(example, irone ore or elder wood logs) or use a designated vista
masterwork – finish a simple event or easy jumping puzzle
rare – finish a chain event or difficult jumping puzzle or easy/quick dungeon
exotic – finish a longer/difficult dungeon or map wide meta event or win a ranked spvp match
ascended -kill the last boss in a raid wing (Mathias or Sabetha)
Again, it goes without saying that the reward should be relatively appropriate to the time/effort invested.
As a side note, this rarity system could be a great way to get newer players to ‘’emerge from their shell’’ and go from world boss farmers, to dungeoneers, to spvpers and/or raiders.
What if an annoying/bugged event is rolled and we don’t want to or can’t finish it?
The ideal sollution to this would be to add a free permanent item to the game that destroys a selected stone (much like a salvage kit) and then rerolls to a new objective. The reason it would destroy one stone is to prevent players from just rerolling tasks until they get the easy ones. Nobody here really wants to go back to the old cof p1 farming days I assume.
Why would this work?
Well, I think everyone here knows someone that logs in only to do their dailies (maybe you’re that someone) and after that, they’re lost. Well these are basically dailies on crack. And the system is not really even too hand-holdy. It does tell you where to go, but the adventure itself and the encounter is up to you to resolve (or reroll). So, to summarize, quest stones would be the ideal ingame answer to the question ‘’what is there to do after I reach max level’’
So that’s the end of my rant, if you’ve actually read through it all then all I can say is -thank you, you’re awesome- So I’m curious as to what do you guys think, would something like this be a waste of dev time or is it something you’d thoroughly enjoy like I think I would.