This issue concerns me quite a bit, so I’d like to suggest to Anet some ways how it could be handled.
Currently, mastery XP (as well as mastery points) are split into two separate regions. Central Tyria and the Heart of Maguuma. Both of them are count, acquired and spent separately. It’s pretty clear that in the future, perhaps once the new expansion is released, Anet intends to introduce new regions that will, again, have complete separate masteries and related currencies.
What really bothers me about the current system is that any experience you acquire after you maxed out your masteries, basically goes into trash can. You don’t even get spirit shards after reaching a particular threshold, everything is lost.
To make matters worse, new masteries are going to be introduced for current regions (so far we’ve seen it once after the release of raid wing 2, more are expected to come) and they will require you to get that XP all over again. This basically disincentivizes you to play the game at all, because part of what you’ve achieved gets completely scrapped and the game will force you to play old content over and over again every time new mastery gets released.
Anet even acknowledged the problem and publicly stated (around the release of HoT) that farming CoF P1 for experience is perfectly okay and that they’re aware that players spent thousands of hours in central Tyria and shouldn’t be forced to do old content again. Basically they allowed us to burst through the masteries in central Tyria quickly and without so much pain.
I’m not saying that I don’t enjoy old content. Actually I still do map exploration in Tyria, daily dungeons and FotM, some event chains and other stuff. But I hate the fact that if I was to ignore these things now and do them later instead, I would get much more reward than just doing them now, when I feel like it. The game is actively discouraging me from doing what I want, when I want.
So how do I propose this problem could be solved? Introduce experience tanks. If at any point players receives experience, that cannot be used to progress his masteries, it will instead go into a virtual tank, where it will be stored for later use. When that player is able to spend that XP (like when new masteries are introduced), he will simply transfer that experience from the tank into the mastery. Of course every region would have its own separate tank, so Tyrian XP wouldn’t get mixed up with that from Maguuma or some potential new expansion-related region. This way players are still gonna have to get every XP point for masteries from new content and can’t just skip it, but they will have much less pain getting mastery XP for old content they’ve played for thousands of hours. No XP is gonna get wasted, it will all serve some use in the future.
