There has been a lot of positive feedback about LS content becoming permanent.
IMHO, one of the most important characteristics of any permanent content, specially on a MMO, is its replay value, and it’s not rocket science that rewards play a huge role on it.
After having played this LS release for a while, I’m quite concerned on it not properly working in this regard and the whole permanent thing providing nothing but a chance for newcomers and players that could have temporarily quited to play the story and somewhat experience the content.
First of all, lets take a look at map mechanics.
Zephyrite favor level plays a big role on how rewarding the content is through vendor prices and rises with the amount of events that are completed, so encourages player splitting.
Currency, however, is get by individual participation on those events, so encourages taking part in as much as possible, thus a roaming zerg.
Unlike most content, which promotes either zerging or splitting for optimal results, Dry Top suggest some kind of phased approach, with most runs being driven by geode farming and a few others, from time to time, being done in order to achieve a high favor level.
Needless to say that expecting the preferences of every player to match in time is ridiculous, so a good level of cooperation is unlikely to take place. On top of that, once the LS move on, we should not only expect a lower population, but also an extreme reduction on player split (which is naturally caused by region achievements atm), decreasing the overall profitability of the zone (which even now doesn’t look like a big thing tbh).
I’m not sure either on the account bound nature of most crafteable items being a good design choice. Account bound items probably bring a higher population, but marketeable ones often lead to a more experienced, thus more likely to organize and cooperate, one.
Story missions are, however, what concerns me the most. By not granting any reward at all after the first completion, this missions lose pretty much all their replay value (and indirectly contributes to low populated zones).
While a high reward could drive a lot of people out of the open world and be undesirable, a moderate/low one could actually be something positive.
After first time completion, replayability is completely driven by achievements, which not only lack replay value themselves but often behave on a hit or miss basis.
If an achievement is granted at some middle stage of the run, there’s no reason at all to not abort the mission right after it (and restart it again in case of failure). Achievements that are rewarded at final stages can potentially be perceived as a huge waste of time, with the player being forced to go through the same cutscenes and usually faceroll encounters over and over.
A not specially tempting daily chest would prevent players from ending up an achievement run empty-handed and might encourage a more relaxed approach, were failed tasks are just left for another day, when rewards would be available again. Even if a lot of players (myself included) would still ignore it and try to complete the achivements ASAP, it could be enough to reduce the sense of frustration for many others.
In any case, as I’ve already said, since achievements lack replay value, so does the content.
Now that story missions are permanent and technichally replayable, a good solution for this could be about introducing some system working in a similar fashion to what Zaishen quests and, to a minor extent, storybooks did in GW1.
For those who didn’t play GW1 (not in their latest versions at least), Zaishen Challenge Quests were tasks that changed on a daily basis and offered extra rewards for completing some specific content, like defeating a boss or replaying some story mission.
Storybooks tracked player progression over a set of content (dungeons, story missions on a campaign, …) and could be turned anytime into rewards that were increasing the more filled the book was.
While these rewards couldn’t compete with the most effective farming methods, they were still high enough to be considered on a more casual/relaxed gameplay and not only brought replay value to content that otherwise would likely had been ignored but also made the game a lot less repetitive.
I realize that, with only a single chapter available, it’s probably too early to request this kind a features, but I really hope ANet is working on something like this for the long run. Otherwise, the permanent nature of a big part of the LS releases is likely to be wasted.
(edited by Vargamonth.2047)