Guild Wars 2

For the Home Instance, I’m thinking if they want people to return there more often, it might be a good idea to keep it “alive” like the Living Story. Like with each new patch, there’s a small team that adds updates to the happenings in the Home Instance and maybe even missions or chance events of some kind that will make it feel interesting to the player.

As an example to this, Bioware’s “Dragon Age” and “Mass Effect” have times when, if you revisit an area, you can see a new interaction between characters there and maybe have some new dialogue. This can probably work side by side with the main Living Story.

Opinions?

I would love there to be more interesting things in the home instance than reward mining nodes. The home instance was supposed to be a place where players could always go to and catch up with characters from their personal story, it was also supposed to be noticeably affected by your decisions in the personal story. To my knowledge only the human home instance has any notable changes based on your story choices.

So yes, anything to make the home instance more interesting and worth visiting, daily node mining isn’t terribly compelling.

i added this to the other home instance post/thread

Home instance is being fixed?

So with the new Krait Obelisk Shard as a place of power, and the last two home instance nodes, the home instance is getting a lot more attention. Anet has talked about our home instance as being something important since way before launch. I imagine like many plays we only go in there to gather our nodes. There is nothing to do there. I am sure the “fix the home instance” thread is somewhere on the forum but now we can see more of the Anet plan. The basic question is what will make the home instance more than nodes and some NPCs? What will improve the “HI” and what are some of the possible problems with suggested changes? Ill start with my final vision of what the HI should look like. Then look at the issues that might be caused by that type of HI.
A cross between the hall of monuments the menagerie and the current HI would not mind hanging out with guildies. The Scrying pool in the hall of monuments in GW1 is a great idea. I want to go back and relive some of my personal story. At the moment I am doing the story on my alts and get to see some of the different choices, but I have enough alts to also redo some of my main characters stories. What happens when all of my alts are done. I have to piggyback on another player’s story. That is good for playing with others but choosing a story mission you both like might be better. People might choose the shortest story mission to do to get credit for the daily, but there are other dailies that would be faster than a personal story. It would make the personal story kind of like unlocking a dungeon at a certain level and make them replayable. It would also make the path you selected more important since you could only replay your own personal story from your HI. A big reason to do alts is to see the other story paths so inviting people to replay your stories on your alts would be cooperative.
As a ranger the menagerie in GW1 was a great place to run around. I would love to go home and see all my pets just walking down the street. Or the spiders hiding on the second floor of the big nose teds mission. And if any dev reads this please for the millionth time. Charmable pet rabbit please! You might say it would just make ranger pet charming too easy if new ranger just went into an instance and charmed all the pets, then just don’t make the pets charmable. It would also be a great place to store your unlocked skins. If you had to go to your HI to take out your town clothes. I have baseball caps horns witches hats just taking up space. It would be kind of like the festival hat vendor. You pay a little to remake the holiday helm but you can destroy it if you like. A few silver would totally be worth paying for that convenience.
Add stuff to do in the home instance. The NPCs I get from my personal story just hang out in the same spot all the time. Maybe they could have a house to go to. We could play belchers bluff at the bar, have the golem mini game, Mini pet battle arena like in LA. A timed jumping puzzle around the roof tops like the torch run. The Jumping puzzle would requires 5 new puzzles, one for each race, but if they make it like a guild rush obstacle course with just markers it might be easier to implement. Only a cooking station just for entertaining. The other stations will still be outside. The Vabbi run around drunk steal drink then kill harpies was a great mission. Polymock.
The adding place of power to charge the crystals in your home instance is ok, especially if they add another crafting item that needs to be charged to be used. Charged loadstones? 25 loadstones then take them to a place of power. But not the same one twice. So you would still have to run around the world charging stuff. They would just have to add the uncharged loadstones.
Adding a TP, bank, guild bank or other crafting might be too much. Then why go out into the city. Adding an asura gate might be ok if it leads to the dominion of winds city. It would allow those who have access to the content behind the Tengu walls an easy way to move back and forth between campaigns. It would work like the ships do separating the people who only have one of the GW1 campaigns. Maybe also ask where you want to go, HoM, Dominion of Wind, Guild hall, like in GW1 Having an Asura gate to lion arch would be redundant.
I am hoping for the best. Adding a little at a time is better than adding too much and then having to remove some of it.

Heading back to your home instance feels like a chore currently. An inventory item or some other method to travel directly home would be a nice quality of life improvement.