I haven’t seen any other threads about this particular issue, so I decided to go ahead and make one myself. I’ve been testing out the new “map rewards” system in Central Tyria, and am somewhat underwhelmed. I spent several hours in Mount Maelstrom and Cursed Shore over the last week, and although I wanted to like the new system, I’m forced to admit that it’s a failure in its current form.
The idea, in concept, is sound – play on a map, and earn specific items as rewards for completing events. However, in practice, this system seems to be extremely limited. You don’t earn an item for each event – it’s more like every 2 events. In addition, there are four or five different rewards you may get, and chances are, you’re looking for one of the rarer ones that doesn’t come up as much. For example, I was looking for Destroyer Cores for my Frostfang precursor collection, and only got one in the 3-4 hours I was doing Cursed Shore events. That’s not really any better than going out and grinding for the cores, and it’s certainly much worse than doing one of the newer zones, selling excess gear, and then buying the cores off the TP outright.
The problem is that the “old world” zones just don’t give good enough rewards in general. If I spend an hour doing events in Silverwastes or the HoT zones, I’m guaranteed to have a packed inventory by the time I’m done. In the older zones, I have to find an event (not easy in some zones), complete the event (most likely without other people’s help because there are fewer people around), and then maybe I’ll earn one shiny bauble or venom sac, instead of the destroyer core I was going for.
I haven’t tried the lower level zones yet, but I imagine that the rewards are even more ridiculous. I can’t imagine farming lower-level events in the hope that I’ll get one scrap of linen or wool.
I believe, if the intention is to get people to go back to the older zones, then the events need to give out similar rewards to what we would get if we were doing events in a newer zone. The advertised map reward should be given out after every event, rather than every other event. The rewards that come up more often should give multiples, rather than just a single item. For example, 2 venom sacs instead of one, or 5 pieces of cloth/leather at a time. The only reason I would ever take the time to go for map rewards is if playing on the map is actually rewarding. Otherwise, there really isn’t much point.
In the meantime, I guess I’ll just go back to HoT, where loot is thrown at me regardless of whether or not I was actually doing an event, and hope that I eventually sell enough blues and greens and random crafting components to buy what I actually want.