Guild Wars 2

If you had to pick one, how would you prefer to obtain gear and rewards in GW2?

A) Repeatable tasks to collect tokens to spend. Rewards are purchased with tokens.
B) Completing unique tasks one time. Rewards scale with challenge.

Discuss your preference and try to avoid what you think other people should be doing. What is your personal preference?

For gear, I would just like to be able to craft whatever I need. Thankfully, I can craft most. The rest is time gate, but that doesn’t bother me since I will get what I want eventually instead of having to grind which I may or may not get what I want.

Rewards, I don’t mind doing repeatable tasks in this game. I’m only wanting some gold so I can buy siege and mats to make superiors. I’ll probably end up doing repetable stuff anyway so I can get those skill points.

I really don’t like the PvE much in this game and only do it so that I can get the mats/gold that I want. Usually when I have made what I want, I ignore PvE until I need to make more siege.

That would depend on what exactly the tasks in B are, how many it takes and how hard they are to do.

Personally I don’t really care what exactly the method is for obtaining gear, what’s important is that I can go through the process once and then I’ve got my gear, don’t need to think about it any more and can get on with playing the game instead of worrying about what I have to do to get the gear I need.

Or alternatively it should be available in a lot of different ways so that I can just play and I’ll get it sooner or later, although for this to work you really need either content scaled for people in mid/high end gear or lots of tiers with relatively little difference between them so you’re not restricted from playing most of the content until you’ve gotten the relevant gear.

IMO GW2 has a mix of both and it does work. By the time I got to level 80 I had enough karma to buy a full set of exotic armor from the temples in Orr and enough gold to get some cheap exotic weapons from the TP. And once I’d done that I had gear that was appropriate to all the content in the game so I didn’t need to worry about it any more.

Ascended gear is obviously taking me longer but since I don’t need it to play I’m not bothered about that and since I can get it with laurels and I usually manage to do my daily without really having to think about it or put any time in (and even did the monthly this month) it’s not getting in my way so I don’t care.

(Obviously this excludes ascended weapons, I haven’t looked into them yet so other than the legendaries I’m not sure how you get them. But as I said they’re not required so I’m not worried about it, I’ll get them as and when it’s convenient.)

Answer:

C) Nothing of both directly!

I prefer rewards, that are appropriate for the effort for what you have to do to earn them. Tasks, can can be either unique and one time doable or repeatable doesn’t matter.

Repeatable just means, that it allows the devs to come up with a much wider range of rewards, when you have earn token that you can spend for something.
If the rewards for somethign aren’t wide spread over a large amount of various things that you can either buy or unlock for your, then it makes simply no sense to make as task repeatable. Then its just better to design the task to be more challenging and a one time thing.

A good mix between both, A and B will always be betten, than focusing too much on only one side.
But the key word here is “appropriate” and thats sadly something, very oftenly isn’t the case on MMOs.

Rewards tend often to be very lousy in regard of the effort you had to get them, regardless if the task was now repeatable, or not.

Good Rewards are those, that either are “useful” to the player, because they improve somehow the character or could be used in the game for something, that can be later benefitial for the player.
Or rewards, that are profitable, with that you can get some good money with that you can buy you simple somethign what you want.

And the last point.. good rewards are those, that will never lose their usefulness.
Tokens will lose their usefulness, if there is nothing you can spend them for, that you want to buy ALWAYS. If you reach the point, where you have nothign to spend tokens for anymore, because you bought already everything you want/need, then these tokens become pointless.
So there always need to be things, a player wants to spend tokens for or to change tokens into somethign else, that can be always useful for the player, is consumeable and thus needs to be permanently bought new so that theres in the end a permanent need to get new tokens also to close the cycle.

However, in regard of your 2 choices, if I had to just choose really now only between these options, I’d take B.
A just means grind, unless the way of how you gain tokens permanently changes to make the collecting of tokens not boring, cause of you doing always one and the same thing for your tokens, what is for me the definition of grind.

B is the imo much better game design, which is in the end also alot more meroable for the player and epic, doesn’t feel like grind, when you always have to do something unique and new, that feels different and when you’ve successfully done something, it feels much more like an achievement also, as if you’d know, you can permanently repeat that content X until your fingers and eyes are bleeding and you die out of boredom caused through eternal grind.

Theres nothing wrong with repeatable tasks, as long the way to your goal is always different. Thats the reason, why people came up with things like “Dungeon Crawlers”, where you can run a hundred million times the same dungeon, but each run being always totally different, than the last one before.

This together with some kind of dynamic event system would surely be awesome.
But GW2’s dungeon design is based on fix designs, they never change, you have different pathes, but the paths itself stay always the same.
Once you’e done them all often enough, you can’t just see them anymore as they become more and more boring over time.

The Dungeon System of GW2 is something, that needs improvements and additions in regard of rewarding options to keep the players interested in doing them. GW1’s Dungeosn felt in overall more rewarding, than those of GW2, but I don#t know if i’m the only one, who thinks that.
Especially also Story Mode, its absolutely unrewarding to do Story Mode with anybody. It feels just like a waste of time totally for the helpers.