Guild Wars 2

I’m concerned about this too.

I can’t speak for everyone, but to me, the psychology behind an achievement system is very specific. Via the achievement system, the game should be telling you “There are 1000 challenges to complete in this game, and you have done 18 of them.” It’s a way to measure how much of the game you’ve “beaten,” which is especially compelling — to some players — in an MMO, where sometimes the game lacks obvious direction.

If a source of infinite Achievement Points exists, I feel like the system is poorly designed. GW2 goes a long way to accommodate the achievement-oriented player: when you look at the map, for example, they tell you how many vista points you’ve visited, and how many you haven’t. Imagine if instead, they had a system where the map keeps track of how many vista visits you’ve done in your character lifetime, with no cap. Infinite vista point points. Every time you went to any vista point, the number would increase by 1.

To some players, this might seem fine. Sure, the number keeps track of how avid of a vista seeker you are. But it doesn’t fulfill the current function of driving people to hunt down every last vista point in the game, which is great fun.

I think the idea of only rewarding the daily achievement points once, but continuing to give rewards on successive days in the form of money, xp or other items is a good one. It would be great if we could hear a developer chime in on this.