Guild Wars 2

This week’s match has been the best so far, and I’m glad there’s still fighting going on. It’s dull when two of the servers give up after a few days. Regardless of the final score, Crystal Desert and Dragonbrand have given us some memorable fights, great lessons, and superior siege placement locations.

I’d be in WvWvW more this week if I didn’t keep getting the invisible players bug. Seeing only ranger pets is more discouraging than going up against the best guilds over and over.

I’m the clueless Asura Thief in PiNK with a pirate hat who spams cluster bombs at the location you were a few seconds ago and then dies really fast.

I haven’t done any dungeon content yet post-beta, so take this with a few grains of salt.

I think part of the problem is the reward schedule. The primary extrinsic reward for running dungeons is the armor set. Each piece of armor is only available after a relatively large number of runs. There is only one reward schedule, it is fixed, and it is too long. I haven’t done any dungeons yet partly because it did not seem like the best time vs reward.

Most games focus on a single method of rewarding players for doing content, such as a currency (tokens that you trade for armor), random gear drops per kill, random gear drops per milestone (a treasure chest for reaching at a certain point or performing a task), etc. It is probably better to have multiple overlapping extrinsic rewards on different schedules for the same content.

It might improve motivation to include a chance of the primary reward in each run as well as a guaranteed reward over time with the alternate currency. For instance, add a low chance to get a piece of the dungeon armor or another exotic in every run. Usually players will get something of lesser value. The important thing is that there is a chance to get the primary reward each run. You could make this chance available only once per day per dungeon to encourage variety or only available after a full clear to discourage running past most of the content. Hopefully, if the chance is low, it won’t negatively affect the endgame economy.

You could also convert the current token system to a somewhat more random schedule that encourages variety by adding “daily achievements” for completing dungeon content in a certain way. Each bonus completed per day would give additional tokens for that run.

Of course, the best way to keep players doing content is to make the intrinsic rewards very high (and I think Guild Wars 2 has generally done a better job here than any MMO so far), but intrinsic rewards are difficult to intentionally design.