Halt/Eliminate:
- Stat Progression
- Level cap progression
Reallocate toward:
- Character capability expansion
- Account capability expansion
- Player skill expansion
1. Character capability expansion in the form of new skills, abilities, and traits. This is the epitome of horizontal progression – expanding your character’s capabilities without increasing their stat power or level cap.
ANet has created one of the best, most fun, and interesting combat and talent build systems in the industry. Double down on that. Give us more of it. Stat progression is boring by comparison. I know the balancing may be more difficult, so just add these things gradually, like the healing skills. One new addition every ~3 or ~4 months would be fine.
Also, ideally, make them rewards for accomplishing something in the game – Living Story Meta achievements, a certain Fractal/PvP/WvW rank, quest series, etc. – rather than just for skill points or gold. That’s a richer and more rewarding experience.
2. Character meta expansion. Another good example of horizontal character progression would be achieving more convenience and flexibility. Expanding bank & bag tabs, deepening slot caps from 250 to 1000, etc.
Another thing that could be done is, make Ascended gear as or more difficult to obtain than it currently is, but give it the ability to swap stats like Legendaries. Legendaries get aesthetics and stat swapping, Ascended only gets stat swapping. As is, the mere idea of gearing up my 4 80s with multiple sets of Ascended is so exhausting I can barely even contemplate it, but if each only took one set whose stats could be swapped at will out of combat, that increased convenience would be more than worth working for. Of course, you’d have to figure out what to do Rune/Sigil/etc slots in such a system but I’m sure you could figure that out.
3. Player Skill Development. Simply, less frequent but more challenging content updates. Reduce frequency to one per month, and make them difficult, like Tequatl, the Molten dungeon, or Aetherpath dungeon. Some of the LS updates have added great new challenges, others have been just an unchallenging achievement grind.
Also add a “Solo” category to the achievement system for people who do things like Solo Lupi, Mossman, Archidiviner, or open world champions like Champion Risen Abomination, Khol Skullcrusher, etc. Other than insanely fast speed kills/speed runs that’s some of the most interesting and challenging stuff in the game, and people do it for exactly that reason – they don’t even get a title or gear reward or Achievement for it. If you must provide a reward, provide titles only as the reward, no need for any kind of item there.
4. Skill Gating, not Gear Gating. FotM has the right idea – same dungeon with multiple levels of increasing difficulty and challenge, however not the right implementation. Agony is a form a gear gating, but what we really want is skill gating. For example, the Uncategorized harpies start off simple and gain knockback at level 10. That is proto-brilliant dungeon design, and would have been straight brilliant had all of FotM had been implemented like that – no increasing Agony levels, but instead increasingly difficult dungeon mechanics. That’s more work for the dev team than adding mere Agony damage, but the result is a much more interesting experience based on skill gating rather than gear gating.
The key idea is expansion, not progression of game assets, but achieves player progression as a nice side effect. Expansion of capability and convenience, at the character level, account level, and even player level both requires and confers player skill progression. This achieves the same level of player investment in the game (via their built-up account), but without the burnout associated with endless gear stat treadmill grinds. Every addition to your character/account/personal skill/accomplishment repertoire is energizing – it refreshes and reinvigorates the game – rather than draining and burnout-inducing.
