Guild Wars 2

This is a observation about downscaling, not a gripe or complaint, just a question and suggestion, please keep fanoi flaming and other nonsense out of the discussion.

I’ll preamble with GW2 is incredibly well done, and I am very pleased that the carrot in this game is skins and not stats as was with GW1, however, part of your endgame is either not what you led me to believe, or not as you intended.

You get gear in one of three ways.
Dungeons
Gold
Karma

The first two are working great, even the first dungeon, AC is still worthwhile for a lvl 80 to do, and downscaling works here, gold rewards are easy and obvious, just play the market for a few weeks, and anyone of any level can do this.

Karma rewards however… Pretty much because of the way downscaling works and everyone needing massive amounts of karma, the orr zones, specifically cursed shore is pretty much the only endgame lvl 80 zone, there is no point to go back to the other zones (as I feel anet wanted me to think the entire game was endgame due to downscaling) because the Karma rewards are not worth doing the DE chains compared to Cursed shore.

For example, a VERY well done encounter, the fire shaman in iron marches. Why would anyone ever do this event. For all the raiders who love scripted fights, this is a great one, it takes about 30 minutes to down, he has 3 stages of the fight, and each one is different, between stages you fight a giant fire elemental. If you dont dodge his VERY obvious 1shots, then you get 1shot. Exactly what a boss fight should be…… however the rewards for your half hour of real effort downing the boss, 150 karma, (mediocre xp and a silver). This should at the very least have a chest at the end.

My point is, downscaling players is GREAT, it keeps encounters from being trivial and makes the entire game PLAYABLE by a max lvl max geared toon, which is great. Kudos anet really, but because the rewards are not upscaled to be on par with cursed shore, vew few will ever both doing these zones for leveling or map completion.
You can see it already, the starter zones, and orr zones are packed all day, the rest of the world is a solo player game usually.

Consider upscaling rewards to player level in addition to downscaling players to keep it challenging, or the awesome world you designed will be very empty aside from a handful of zones. A lot of really neat DE chains go completly ignored