Hello,
Now I thought I’d put out a little suggestion on the forums to offer some ideas on how to get players back into the world.
First we need to give maps more unique in terms of rewards. There are two ways I thought up of that this can happen.
1. Make tokens that drop in each map and these can be turned in to a vendor for specific weapon and armor skins. Much like dungeons. Each event and champion can award tokens once per reset. The amount awarded depends on their difficulty.
2. Make specific weapons and armor skins that have a chance to drop per area. Group events up into Easy-Hard-Hardcore type of groups. Easy has a X percent, Hard has a higher percent, and hardcore event higher.
Finally another big thing is that players have no commitment to maps. They don’t feel like the maps and what happens in them is important. There are a few ways we can do this.
1. Guild Castles/Villages/Strucutres. In each map there would be 2-3 structures that guilds would automatically claim depending on their influence. Now you would of course introduce a influence drain to help reduce AFK guilds, but I loved the AB system with guilds and towns in Gw1. Now one way you could do things is offer unique buffs/rewards/important things to endgame players in these structures and access to these things depends on the stability of the region that their structure is in. Higher stability? More rewards. For each event that fails or goes unfinished for X amount of time, the stability of the region starts to deplete. These areas would also offer unique rewards for leveling players and none guild players in the area to take advantage of. This is by far my favorite idea and I think would be amazing to include in the game some how. I think the higher level the zone is, the mroe influence required to gain a structure in, but the better the rewards. So these 500 person guilds with tons of influence would be situated in Orr where the large amount of gear players are needed the most.
2. Introduce more meta event bosses and tie many events in the entire zone to this fight with the boss while increasing the rewards for it. For example tequatl. Very hard boss fight, can drop some pretty boss gear. Make it so events all over the region are tied to it some how. The hylek town, the pact, etc. You do these events and it will make your fight with tequatl easier in some way. Not just flat out reducing her HP, but perhaps giving NPCs, good environmental weapons, siege, etc.
What will these suggestions produce?
New events will be done more since guilds need to do them to help keep the stability of the region up. Leveling players wont be as bored since they’ll be interacting with other players more often. Guilds feel more important. Rewards are better and endgame would feel more vibrant. The world will feel more alive. Events will feel more important. The wiki would expand more since players will need information on these events and fights. A huge chunk of the game that obviously received a lot of attention detail wise will finally receive a much needed a deserved population increase.