Guild Wars 2

1) Proposal overview

Extended achievement & associated titles system for fractals.

2) Goal of the proposal

The goal is to make fractals, through a seemingly easy implementation of hard achievements & associated titles, into more of an end-game experience. You give people an additional goal to strive for. Instead of striving for gear (which is nothing more than status/vanity) you strive for titles (which are nothing more than status/vanity). Both things do not have to exclude one another of course. The value of these titles will rather simply be decided by the difficulty of ataining them (if the difficulty resides in maximizing gameplay); so the goal gets more valuable as the goal gets harder to achieve/will take you longer to learn (replayability!).

3) Proposal functionality

Not sure what to put here but let me use it for the following. Since the goal for most players in fractals now is gear, and since the best way to get gear is to do fractals fast, the best choice for those players is to go max dps. But if your goal is some achievement which requries you for instance to stay above 50% health, or to let a lot of mobs live during some fight (etc, etc) dps no longer becomes the best choice. I mean to say: you can design achievements in such a way that going dps is not the maximizing strategy for ataining them. Moreover, if the achievements are varied enough, multiple sets of gear will be the best choice for the job at hand. This proposal therefore also helps to alleviate an often heard complaint: that dps is really the only way to go.

4) Associated risks.

Not sure. But with respect to asking for assistence from other members of the CDI: what hard achievements can you come up with?
“Do not let a single party member get downed during a complete run of fractals level 50” Title: Immortal, Among Others. (i’ve not done lvl 50 yet, if its to easy, find yourself something harder)

What i find the best about my proposal might be due to a lack of game development knowledge. It seems to me that achievements are really easy to implement and don’t take a lot of development time.

Suggestion: make it so that we can preview a one handed weapon and an offhand at the same time. Bound to have been noticed/suggested earlier but if so, let this be one more cry.

There are many aspects of gw2 that i’m in love with, but the one that stands out is the way it can be compared to a card game such as magic. In magic a large part of the game consists in chosing the cards you’re going to play with, that is, in creating your deck. Because of the way traits, skillpoints and weapon skills are organised in gw2, there is a high component of ‘choosing your deck’-style of gameplay, which i find fantastic. Add to this combo fields and teamplay synergetics, it’s not only limited to individual players but a team itself can be seen as a deck which has to be finely attuned.

The problem is, being mainly a pve player, that i do not feel there are many ways in which the game actually forces you to invoke this kind of strategic thinking. The content is simply not hard enough. Now, even if you disagree with this last statement, it doesn’t matter for the suggestion i want to make because then simply see it as a suggestion to add more of what there already is.

My suggestion is to add to the game titles that would correspond do the finishing of a set (or sets) of dungeon achievements. These achievements would be of the form of finishing certain boss fights in hard to achieve ways. I’m thinking of wow ofc, where these titles are already in place. There seem to me to be all kinds of ways this could be implemented, and it also seems to me to be a cost effective way for the devs to add a sense of progression topve play without infringing (and actually being nicely in line with) their philosophy of making end-game about prestige.

There is one element to rng that is by some overlooked. I do not think a solution lies in somehow capping the max number of keys required or any such mechanic. (1) You cannot cap it at a hundred keys because that would guarantee ‘rich’ people to obtain the item solely (i mean: they are the only ones that are GUARANTEED to get the item).(2) But you also cannot simply sell them (‘cap them at 10’), for I guess arena.net wants to keep them really rare. So the question is: how, through a rng mechanic, can you still keep items rare without getting the fuss we are now seeing?

A possible solution would be the following.. Cap the number of items you can buy per day/week/total that give you a chance of getting an item. In this way people wanting to spend a lot of money will not spend way to much (you protect them from themselves, and to this arena.net is morally obliged in my opinion) while still allowing other players ‘to take chance’. The nature of rng is that there simply is no guarantee you get the item. If you do it like this, the gambling can remain fun and remains transparant with respect to the fact that quite possibly, you will not get anything.

This ofc only applies to rng ‘events’, not to permanent rng-gambling mechanics.