Guild Wars 2

I would like to congratulate the following on Dragonbrand for this week’s fun -
[NNK], [TFV], [EA], [TB], [NITE], [GOTL], [TSR], [RegA], [SYN], [RAT], [PRO] and all the smaller guilds I see in passing

And in second place and certainly not forgotten for the traitors they are [AF]. Watch your tail more and maybe you wont fill my inventory as much.

Hello peeps. I was directed to this thread by a fellow friend in my guild and have been reading about many common points. Several individuals have revealed problems while others have discussed solutions. I would like to be another player trying to come up with solutions to these common problems.

1. Horizontal Progression – I see many things in this game in the form of one-shot skins. I agree that for this kind of progression to work to the goal of vanity that new designs must be introduced, but its the implementation that causes some friction among players. With this line of thinking I’m focusing on the Living Story skin rewards. Those that have participated in those events can show off the game progression they have been apart of. Which is fine even for a late comer like myself to GW2. What I’d like to see is more development in the design space already in game. The meta achievements reward a skin for your account so why not utilize the account bound skin window on a player’s achievement page to allow those rewards to be used more than once.

2. Vertical Progression – Many MMOs look at vertical progression as a gear treadmill and more difficult content. Several posts within this forum have discussed ascended armor in detail, so I’ll spare going to far into the topic other than coming up with a solution. Like in the horizontal point about account-bounding skins, I want to focus on a design space already in the game. Pristine Fractal Relics. This currency is very under-utilized in my opinion and by using it towards the accumulation of ascended armor and weapons in a fair amount (determined by the average time of the game community to acquire them) you help another group of players. But wait there is more to this line of thinking… use Badges of Honor for the WvW-core players to acquire theirs. Then you create an environment more appealing to a broader scope of players than purely through crafting. But on the note of crafting (and since the market will determine values over time anyways) why not make ascended armor/weapons be available for sale. This would continue the flow of in game gold (which can become stagnate often because of updates), and yet allow another avenue of acquisition to the game population.

3. Acquisition – Even though this forum topic is focused on both horizontal and vertical progressions, I’d like to highlight one other point belonging to each of these – the acquisition of materials for the success of these progressions. With DR affecting loot drops, inequality of time to reward ratios across several forms of game modes and time available to a wide range of players (ie. hardcore vs casual players) I think that the collecting of material is daunting. Anyway you slice it players want a decent amount of this gaming portion to be fair. One way to accomplish this is by changing the dungeon rewards system. In addition to the raw coin awarded at the end of a dungeon, you can utilize yet something else in the game. From the laurel vendors there are the crafting bags. Keep this mind… when the reward prompt appears on the screen give players options. A simple reward could be choosing 20 Empyreal Shards, 10 Dragonite Ore or a Heavy Crafting Bag in addition to your raw coin reward. This allows players to better manage their time by targeting what they want to meet their personal progression goals. This system would be implemented using the daily dungeon model. Then you could use this same system for world bosses and temple events. Instead of rewarding the two rares in the chest above the mini map for completing these events, the reward prompt can offer a fixed rare plus a choice among say for example 50 silver, a Heavy Crafting Bag, 30 Dragonite Ore or 5x Champion boxes. All this is doing is creating an environment that is less alienating to more of the general game population.

In closing I hope these points are thought over and help both the game community in coming up with even more solutions and to also help the developers at ArenaNet with looking at already available game data to improve GW2.