Guild Wars 2

I just came out of a escape from LA event where map chat was dominated by:

a) people complaining that the loot was bad
b)players asking what they needed to do to get acheivments
c)players talking about how happy they would be when they finished the meta and didn’t have to play any more

There seemed to be a general lack of awareness that we had a collective goal in the map. I didn’t see a single post about citizens.

I think achievements can be great for releases that have more disparate content (for example the zephyr sanctum) to give a sense of progression and accomplishment. But for events which have inherent success and failure states I feel the only achievement should simply be to beat the event.

Achievements do help keep players coming back to content and stop it from dying. the solution to this is in three parts.
1- most important and difficult – make the content fun, repeatable and challenging(at a variety of player-skill levels).
2- tie all rewards to the success and failure states of content.
3- Vastly improve event scaling so even if content dies small groups of committed players can still defeat it.

I’d really love to hear from someone who plays the game primarily to tick of their achievements. I think if I understand what the play style is about it will make me less sad. At the moment I feel like I am in a minority of players who play to …… play.

They should have put in an achievement like “2000 citizens PERSONALLY rescued”. THEN they’ll care about the civilians.

Agree, achievements should be on going doing things that matter, not just a check list otherwise two weeks from now, no one will be doing this event once they complete the check list.

Achievements should be personal – these achievements rely far too much on the zerg having a collective goal – and they don’t.

I’ve tried numerous times in map chat to get people to come do the events instead of just fighting the hordes that are left in their wake, but I just get responses such as ’I’ve already done the achievements why should I care’ or ‘the loot is better if I just farm enemies’.

That being said I’ve almost completed all the achievements anyway – but for players who are going to be trying next week it is going to be even more difficult.

Achievements in games have always been designed around giving the individual a sense of achievement and a goal to complete – even in an MMO the majority of achievements should be based around what the individual can do. e.g. how many citizens you save, how many events you participate in (that’s where some of the achevements are fine e.g. Moa’s). As opposed to ‘complete all the events in a cycle’ – which can be very hard to do when there are two or three events going simultaneously and everyone just stays in one spot to maximise their loot.

I “troll?” some maps with my commander tag. I put it on to get attention, once 4-5 players are together, i ask them nicely to done a non-zerg task that will get us rewards.

Most people ignore me and call me troll, but sometimes you get a group of new players that are actively doing something like rescuing the lighthouse npcs just for fun instead of zerging out the big masses of enemies in the north of LA.

It’s not a perfect answer, but a commander telling you what to do creates a missleading effect of “i should do what he says, he’s a commenr, he must know better than me”.