Guild Wars 2

Hayashi.3416:

Almost all non-raid non-krait witch group events are soloable.

Let’s agree to disagree then. I don’t feel this is true, at least not for 90% of the playerbase.

You haven’t mentioned what you think about scaling the character down, about -1 to -2 of the current zone level.

Geralt.7519:

Lishtenbird.2814:

The problem is with megaservers and world bosses, not with downscaling.

Exactly this imo.

The solution is not nerfing the downscaling system but adding an option to let people to switch to less crowded maps (not to mention this would solve a lot of late big issues about lag spikes and freezes).

I disagree, the problem appears in small groups as well. High level players trivialize events for leveling players.

Furthermore, without megaservers you couldn’t even complete group events in most zones.

Sungak Alkandenes.1369:

Below L60 disables GM Traits.
Below L30 disables Elite skill.
Below L20 (starter zones) disables all remaining Traits.
Trait point allocation for the stats is unaffected, and may be re-assigned as needed.

This would ruin whole builds people have worked for a while just to play the playstyle they want. Almost all builds are trait dependant.

Why not just scaling the level of the player instead? I want to create clones when dodging, but I wouldn’t one-shot every mob when my level is 1 below that mob.

Astral Projections.7320:

I think dungeon tokens for events is an interesting idea.

• It’s a currency already in game so another doesn’t have to be added.
• It allows people who don’t do many dungeons to get tokens.
• It rewards people for doing events with the ability to buy rares and exotics they can salvage and also to fill up their wardrobe.
• The NPC who sells items for these tokens can be easily updated to sell new region specific rewards.

yep, and think of it: players who have never entered a dungeon but gathered 100 token by doing events might feel they could try out dungeons in order to complete their set faster.

I don’t think it’s entirely off-topic, we’re talking about revitalizing the game world and a lot of people agree that hearts aren’t the way to go. Also we talked about karma and how there could be a superior currency.

about my suggestion “Veteran Mode” above, there’s one problem: it would feel as an requirement for people to play in that mode in order to unlock the new rewards for the zone-tokens.

There could be a solution to this though:

• a successful completed (gold-medal) event gives you 0-2 token
• the same in veteran mode (your level decreased by 1-2) gives you 2-3 token

This way even casual players who don’t want the bigger challenge or hate being nerved can earn the tokens via events.

(won’t work in dungeons of course since then you’ve got back the magicfind-gear dilemma, crippling your group)

Beldin.5498:

Do you want to level with a low level friend ? No problem .. equip a white lvl 5 weapon and see how your friend kills faster than you.

Really .. tell me why you are here on a crusade to nerf other people to feel that they
only have gotten worse with every level and better gear and traits.

Calm down, we made suggestions that you won’t get nerfed. It’s just that people want all 100% of the content to be relevant for them, not only 15% of the zones we have. Backscaling was made with that in mind. Why else would they have created that system? Currently you one/two hit most of the enemies when scaled back as a lv.80 with exotic/ascended gear.

So why not let people optionally have a bigger challenge by scaling back a bit more to play in the same range as a leveling player?

You rightfully ask why people don’t just put on some white gear. Fair question.

• First of all, they would have a greater risk but without greater reward. It wouldn’t feel fair. You want something good out of a mob which took you 15min to kill.
• Their builds won’t work either (builds that work with a certain amount of crit-value to generate specific effects).

or in the spirit of drytop:

normal playing —> 1 token per event
veteran mode —> 2 token per event

expanding on the idea of zone/region currencies:

Why not bring this alongside a “veteran mode”? Once you’re lv.80 you can play either normally just the way it is now or turn on veteran mode (e.g. by putting on some veteran costume) which scales the characters level down a bit more (in a lv.80 zone you’re lv.79).

Completing events in this mode rewards you with the region tokens.

• more difficult content – check
• more rewards after you’ve reached lv.80 – check
• making old zones relevant again – check

Yes, in theory you can get carried by players who don’t play in veteran mode, BUT since low level players aggro mobs significantly you’re still in more danger than any other player. + all the other “carriers” won’t get the token, so they will probably rethink this strategy and far more players will join in veteran mode.

I would suggest that scaling stays the way as it is for lv.1 – 80 but once you’re there you have the option to make the game manually more difficult for yourself:

Veteran Mode

• talk to a zone npc in order to unlock a new mode for yourself (veteran mode)
• to turn veteran mode on, you have to put on the veteran costume
• your level gets scaled down to -1 of the maximal zone level.
• the veteran costume doesn’t affect your looks, but your gear get’s scaled down to white-rarity (which makes the game harder for you).

a lot of things could be unlocked when playing in veteran mode:

• from now on you get a zone token for each successful event completed with a gold-medal
• prestige rewards can be purchased for these tokens.

Palador.2170:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

what people might forget here (just for the record): we discussed this already in the horizontal progression CDI and It really seems like DryTop’s system is the product of that discussion.

The need for the map to work together to get the best rewards makes the system a bit too aggressive for my tastes. As Dry Top becomes old news, we’re starting to see more of the down sides to it.

It’s a good implementation of the idea, but it still needs refinement.

we were rather discussing zone-specific rewards and progression, can’t remember the idea to work together in order to make rewards cheaper. I like that though, it’s like the whole zone is a meta-event.

what people might forget here (just for the record): we discussed this already in the horizontal progression CDI and It really seems like DryTop’s system is the product of that discussion.

Oh, I stated the wrong day, sorry. I’ve already seen you posting on reddit Chris (a user opened a thread to collect ideas about the guild CDI here: http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/2f0pm9/reddits_precdi_discussion_guilds_and_guild_content/). Don’t forget your wife Chris, don’t forget her

I will probably not participate in the guild-CDI since I’m a late night loner… but I’m looking forward in reading some ideas and comments. I have the feeling that it will be a very complex and chaotic thread since people have tons of different ideas what guild improvements or even guildhalls look like. We’ll see.

I agree, it’s more realistic to take existing rewards (dungeon rewards) than creating tons of now armor-sets. One of the devs clarified once, that creating new armor takes quite a while. I see no problem giving dungeon rewards to explorers now that you can get that gear through sPvP also. It’s not a showcase for completing the dungeon any more.

And think of it: a lot of players who prefer solo content (open world) rather than group content (dungeon) won’t have that gear yet and would love to work for it, even if it takes longer than doing the “more difficult” thing: the dungeon. (more difficult depends on the group of course, not everybody runs with a guild or good players regularly)

NYG.2568:

Is it me or has the surge of “communiction” come to a halt? Seems as If they may think we have been pacified!

The next CDI starts Tuesday. It’s about guilds.

@Vlad: have fun with your next game

Frediosz.2718:

ONE problem that i find while fighting Teqatl is when commanders say before the fight start “when you die use waypoint and come back – no ressing” which i understand, waste of time ressurecting dead players instead of putting 100% of damage AND still people lie dead waiting to be ressurected which causes rage most of the time (yup even i sometimes cant stand it and write them to “use the bloody WP”

I have a solution to this – during boss event (in this case TEQ) can you make something working like anti-AFK in WvW with the exception that instead of disconnect it will be forcefuly ressurecting people in certian location of them map – some waypoint that is 100% of the time unceontested ?
This would prevent main reason that causes people to rage doring Teq.

I too think that this is a problem, it turns players against players, making them angry about others. I think this should be adressed in a meaningful way which doesn’t forcefully hurt one player by auto-spawning him at a waypoint.

I never liked waypointing during battles anyway, they disabled it in dungeons which was a nice step imho. But what happens when you disable waypointing during those large boss-battles? People get angry because they have lost control about the situation, since newbies tend to die a lot. How could this be adressed?

Medic-npcs. (only visible to the defeated player to avoid fps issues)
(small idea about this: defeated symbol changes color to yellow when player is ressed, green when 5 players ress him)

• when you die a medic npc will come to ress you. It will be a slow process but takes about the time it lasts for the player to run back into the battle from the nearest uncontested waypoint.
• those medic-npcs are invulnerable and can’t be killed by mobs.
• downed players will still get regeneration and heal buffs from outside sources so ressing will go a little bit faster.

another note:
And what if downed players lose health slower?

play the game, not the UI?
A small note: I’ve seen a few indicators that Anet tends to use the UI more and more, I don’t think this is a good idea. Wasn’t the philosophy: play the game, not the UI?

example solution: Shatterer
Things need to be adressed better in the gameplay imho. For example the crystals at the shatterer: have them go through many polygon-model phases so that players can easily see how those crystals get wrecked. They could even change colour if they are nearly crushed.

Most important for this: the effects really shouldn’t be in the way by now. I’m sure you are working ambitiously on this, but I feel the gameplay comes dangerously close to “play the UI”. The moa-boss in Drytop was awesome but effects made it difficult to see the tell in order to interrupt at the right time. I’d call it a priority one problem imho, since it’s relevant for all new boss battles and revamps.

Edit:

normalizing effects
what if you do the same to the effects you did with the sPvP enemy-models? Turn them down to a really simple projectile model for example. You can only see your groups effects normally and all the other effects from hundreds of other players get a new simple animation.

• ranged normalized animations would only be visible directly at the player, but get invisible when they move away from him
• flashy effects will be blended out, keep them only for your group (or your squad, see suggestion below)
• melee normalized animations will lose all effects, you can’t see your character when you’re stacked with others, effects don’t matter anyway. Normalized melee-attacks look like autoattacks.

OR
having commander squads effect how much effects you see
you can only see your squads effects. Which would make it usefull to have more commanders since you can only effectively use combos when you can see the effects clearly. Commanders could set limits to their squadsize (or would have a limit naturally which they can expand as they like).

an idea for an interesting shatterer-attack:

• the crystals spawn normally
• the dragon does a HUGE breath-attack which kills everyone instantly except the players that stand in the shadow/behind the crystals.

This means: if you destroy the crystal too fast, you will have nothing to protect you and you will die.

Felkes.2759:

Nope. We’ve seen where harder went with Tequatl, now the boss spawns for his window and almost never gets challenged. Shatterer’s current level of difficulting is just fine.

I don’t understand, I do Tequatl daily for a week now at 2:00am and we were sucessful every time. The only problem I see with these big battles: you have to be on the map for a while before the fight begins.

beastie.4536:

It’s like “drawing legs on a snake”.

People are having hard time unlocking those traits that was introduced in April. Why can’t they address that problem first? to give new players more freedom and less tedious work when leveling. I’m pretty sure majority of the players will not whine or complain if all these new features are not implemented right away.

Sure a lot of people want everythig for free, I call them lazy. Personally I enjoy having to do some gameplay to unlock new traits. Gives me tons of incentives to go out in the world.

Zenty.3596:

Is this something that could actually work in the game?

EDIT: Missed that someone wrote something similar a few pages back

haha yeah we talked about it It absolutely can work, look at drytop. If you take away the tiers and the timed events there still is that core mechanic: you get geodes for every event and can purchase stuff for those geodes at local merchants.

I really like that idea, maybe future legendaries need specific crafting mats that can only be purchased in specific zones for the zone-currency.

relevant, Colin:

I think that’s a totally fair question, as a veteran user I’d wonder that too – why does making the game better for new users benefit me when I want features that benefit me?

The simple answer is: by ensuring the game foundation is solid for new users, we’ll be in a place after the feature pack where we can do the kind of things that excite both veteran and new users simultaneously, and we’ll be able to retain a much larger percentage of the new or long returning users when they show up. Can’t say anything more than that yet – but that’s the thinking, you don’t need to agree with it, but it’s important to know why the decision was made!

and

Yeah we thought so too. After tens of thousands of usability testers and interviews with players who tried Gw2 and left leading up to China launch both in NA/EU and in China – we learned we were wrong.

Honestly, we were kind of shocked how many systems, downed included a surprising number of players just didn’t understand. For downed, we tried a downed tutorial, building downed into the level 1 tutorial, etc. We found after usability testing with numerous different groups, the best rate of people learning and understanding it came from having it be layered complexity and the solution we went with above. Intuitively that wouldn’t have been my guess either initially, but we found people understood it better this way than all other options we tried.

This same level of testing led to the other changes as well. At the end of the day the biggest take away I’d say is: all of us, especially people who go to a reddit to discuss a game, probably know games (and Gw2) really really well. We have millions of users, and a tiny % of them frequent game forums or reddit. Just because all of us, me included, learned those systems well and thought it was all really easy doesn’t mean we are the norm

I have no time at the moment to post the context/questions/statements, look for yourself: http://www.reddit.com/user/ArenaColin

LostBalloon.6423:

This is even worse than not having any red in the thread. It’s horrible and gives people the impression they are being totally ignored, which is what that ANET employee, Regina Buenaobra, did. And I’m not trying to single her out, she’s an example, she’s far from being the only one that does that.

I don’t get it, Regina answers directly to a question (which wasn’t posted here, taking stuff out of context, great guys!). Here again the original quote:

DiogoSilva.7089:

All those changes are important because they fix the several flaws that GW2 has early game: the lack of a sense of progression, poor tutorials, directionless, forgottable rewards and jumpy story instances that forced you to level up midway, interrupting the flow of the story.

So far, this feature patch is great for new players, but, what about the veteran players? It doesn’t seems to offer much to make us stick to the game.

Regina’s answer:

More information will be released next week about features that are more suited to veteran players.

HOW IN THE WORLD is this actually “ignoring the players”??? Do you really wonder why Anet has a hard time talking to us? I do not.

there was also an answer from Colin about a similar thought:

Stupidbookah: It’s almost as if Anet is re-launching Guild Wars 2 again for the people who quit during the first month or haven’t bought the game yet.

That’s nice… But what about the playerbase that has put hundreds or thousands of hours into the game over the past two years and are looking forward to the next step in the development of GW2? :< I almost feel like I would’ve been better off not having bought the game at launch.

his answer:

Colin Johanson: I think that’s a totally fair question, as a veteran user I’d wonder that too – why does making the game better for new users benefit me when I want features that benefit me?

The simple answer is: by ensuring the game foundation is solid for new users, we’ll be in a place after the feature pack where we can do the kind of things that excite both veteran and new users simultaneously, and we’ll be able to retain a much larger percentage of the new or long returning users when they show up. Can’t say anything more than that yet – but that’s the thinking, you don’t need to agree with it, but it’s important to know why the decision was made!

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/2etzxq/a_fresh_start_the_new_player_experience_in_guild/ck35jpy?context=3

what Colin said about adding hearts to new zones:

Lewis: If Elona or Cantha are released, would we expect more vista’s, skill points and hearts or would they be more like Southsun or Bazaar?

Colin: There could be, but hearts would be the least likely thing we’d add. The renown system we felt did a nice job to guide players through our world at lower and mid levels, but we feel at higher levels we really can embrace the events system. I think you’ll see is a larger sense of innovation and growth in what dynamic events can do for a zone. That doesn’t mean vistas and skill points are out the window as it’s highly likely you’ll see those come back with new zones as well.

http://www.guildwars2hub.com/features/interviews/colin-johanson-interview-looking-ahead-part-2

GreenAlien.5623:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

GreenAlien.5623:

No, that is just annoying if you have to buy the lockpick first. Why make it so complicated with farming events for tokens and then searching for chests when you can just make the events rewarding?

Because exploration needs to be rewarded in a game with a world that screams “explore me!!” to you. Why should people who explore a zone for an hour get so much worse rewards than people who run around with a champion train for an hour?

But you have to farm tokens first. Best way to do it in maps with champ trains will be to run around with the champ train, which defeats the purpose.

I haven’t seen that many champtrains on maps with dungeons lately. I might be wrong though. Anyway, events scale so they are solo about equally long as in a zerg. You get the token for event-completion, just like the geodes… so a zerg won’t help much.

And don’t make the mistake to decrease the reward when more players are there… GW2’s design philosophy is: you shouldn’t be afraid of seeing other players. It’s a social game after all.

HHR LostProphet.4801:

The problem with chests is that they aren’t time gated. I agree that there should be some hidden places that give appropriate reward, but you only “find” those places once.
I want the people get involved with the maps and the NPCs on these maps. A reward track that fills if you do different events would serve that purpose. If you have a better idea, I’m curious to hear it.

Well they are in a way: you can’t have endless lockpicks because you need to work for the currency first.

You may find the places only once, but maybe you also find a new event in one of those areas another day. I like the idea of getting rewarded for doing different unique events though. But why not having the event-npcs give you better rewards, the more unique events you’ve done in that zone – instead of watching a bar grow and a chest pop up.

NPC after 2 unique events in a row per zone (without using a waypoint):
—> Hey man, we know you! Here have this – choose 1 of 2 rewards -

NPC after 4 unique events -//-
—> Hey mister, people talk about you!! Here have this – choose 1 out of 3 rewards -

NPC after 10 unique events -//-
—> Hey hero, we love you and want a baby from you!!! Here have this – choose 2 out of 5 rewards + 10 dungeon token

GreenAlien.5623:

No, that is just annoying if you have to buy the lockpick first. Why make it so complicated with farming events for tokens and then searching for chests when you can just make the events rewarding?

Because exploration needs to be rewarded in a game with a world that screams “explore me!!” to you. Why should people who explore a zone for an hour get so much worse rewards than people who run around with a champion train for an hour?

I wonder why events have no surprise rewards now and then. Imagine having the chance for things like these when getting a gold medal:

• sometimes a surprising champion loot box
• rarely a mystic forge key
• rarely a dye
• rarely a mini
• rarely a lodestone
• very rarely a rune of holding (to craft 18 or 20slot bags)
• very rarely a rare dye
  etc.etc.

Simply a huge (seriously huge – anything could drop) loot-table. What I loved during the personal story: Rewards where you could choose one out of 3 items. Do this for events, people would love it. BUT with interesting rewards, cut the blues and greens & junkitems.

The thing is: when people know there is a chance (and even the slightest one) of getting something really really rare, they go miles to get it.

HHR LostProphet.4801:

What about a reward track for finding all hidden places in one area?

Are you still talking about a bar which we have to fill? Why? Isn’t the world itself much more interesting than looking at a bar to fill?

Instead of getting a reward chest pop up in your UI, wouldn’t it be more fun to find a rare spawned chest (see: DryTop sandstorm). And then having a lockpick for this chest which you’ve bought from the zone-tokens you’ve earned by doing events… wouldn’t that feel rewarding?

Why not spawn very rare chests also. Bigger rewards but the big lockpick wouldn’t be cheap either.

Asgaeroth.6427:

Personally I find Dry Top to be the most stale and boring zone in the game. I can’t even stomach going there any more. It’s the same horrible over tuned events going on in the same spots every day.

You realize that the same can be said to hearts? The same activity on the same spot every day.

Hearts aren’t the core content of the game for a reason: they make the dynamic world feel stale. Colin once told us of a world which is never the same. Play the zone a second time and you find new things going on (which was often true for me)… BUT hearts are always there. It kind of breaks this ever changing illusion. Hearts were implemented to guide new players, clearly an afterthought. Events are the true content which make the world feel alive…

…well at least they should. Colin also told us once that a zone which has 100 events at release will have 300 a year from then. Well that concept got scrapped (around halloween) when people didn’t comment on the new implemented events in the world. Were these events just ignored by the people while doing the halloween content? I don’t know, but it is as it is.

I think (I’m not sure) this was the birth of the living story. An attempt to make the world feel alive again. There were a lot of open world changes due to the LS in Season 1.

The thing is, and this is where I agree with you Asgaeroth, that currently the new map feels stale after a while. Events on a timetable don’t make the world feel alive. I still like the map because I haven’t played it too much yet and it’s quite new to me, but what happens when this goes away?

I’m not sure why events don’t spawn more randomly in that map. Why on a fixed schedule? To guarantee a chance for t6-reward vendors? Would event chains in that map really make the experience better? For me it would feel more and more like a karma-train. Meh. I think the best thing what could happen to Drytop would be something GW2 tried to achieve years ago when Colin talked about a changing zone. More surprises. Spawn fresh events, spawn them randomly, increase intervalls between other events and give us some unexpected events in between.

Now that we have a zone with a big incentive to do events, this could finally work out imho.

I’m not sure why someone wants a reward track in the PvE world, I’d rather find things in the zone rather than do events over and over until a full bar hands me over a gift-box. Reward tracks work for sPvP because you can’t explore anything during a PvP match. You focus on the battle against other players, which is variety enough. Having the same mechanic in the open world… meh.

Why not reward players for finding hidden treasure chests in some long lost cave or finding a rare spawned monster and hunting it down? Isn’t this more engaging than filling a bar by doing probably the same 5 events over and over again?

what if you could turn a full karma cap into 200gems each month? ^^ Rewarding players for their loyalty… of course the cap could then be a bit higher than 100.000 karma

another suggestion what to do with karma:

it sounds horrible first, I guess, but read on to the end please
—> make a really low cap to karma (e.g. 100.000)

this way people would actually spend karma (with the prerequisite that there are enough interesting new rewards coming into the game regularly) instead of hoard it because… you know sometime there might be that ultra-reward where you need 100.000.000 karma.

They would spend karma because you’re capped anyway and can’t get more karma at that point.

Now what with all the people with huge amounts of karma, how would you compensate those? Tough one. A random idea:

People can get a karma-token for every 100.000 karma which can be turned into 50.000 karma (fill the half cap) BUT with a timegate. You don’t want them spend millions of karma at once because they would stop playing the game to gain karma. Say: you can use each karma-token only once a month.

I think a cap would be healthy for karma gain since people would be more open to spend the karma.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Karma

I would also like to submit that karma has another issue which is that whenever you purchase something you are setting back your progress towards other purchases.

Now that’s interesting.

Have you considered rewarding players for only getting to a certain karma-treshhold without them having to spend the karma for that reward?

Something like a prestige-armorset or a precursor (idk, throwing around random ideas) which can only be purchased (via an other currency) when one has a specific amount of karma in his wallet. So people have to weight if they would spend their karma for certain goals or hoard it for that specific prestige goal.

(of course, such a feature must be announced LOOONG before it goes live, since people would complain horribly that they “just” spent all the karma on Orr-boxes because they had no idea something like this would happen. Can’t please everyone)

…on the other hand… it would be pretty similar to the achievement-point system where you can’t have negative-progress.

ozmaniandevil.6805:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

That gave me an idea, remember when I suggested getting dungeon tokens for events? You get 1-2 token for completing an event with a gold medal. I love the region wide idea… having a few zones where you get a specific token (like all ascalon zones to get AC token).

What if each region’s dungeon vendor would sell one specific crafting material (t6)? Let’s say Ascalon’s dungeon vendor sells Piles of Crystalline Dust (t6) for 3-6 dungeon tokens.

This way you could directly work on your Legendary without depending on t6-rng drops from laurel vendor bags or drops in general. Do you still need 30 vicious claws? Go to Maaguma zones and do events there. Or armored scales? Kryta it is then.

Now THIS I like. Great idea.

Thanks! I just found out that I missed something: do a dungeon and you would be able to buy tons of t6 mats… so some minor change should find it’s way in here:

• in the open world / events you don’t get whole tokens but only fragments of tokens (combine 2 to create a token). The T6 mats will be only purchaseable by fragments then.

Kentsui.4930:

Also, should the exclusive items of a particular vendor not interst you, you still would have some incentive to play in the zone because you can spend your tokens elsewhere as well or fall back on the crafting ingredients.

It is also something very close to what the Orr temple vendors already do.

That gave me an idea, remember when I suggested getting dungeon tokens for events? You get 1-2 token for completing an event with a gold medal. I love the region wide idea… having a few zones where you get a specific token (like all ascalon zones to get AC token).

What if each region’s dungeon vendor would sell one specific crafting material (t6)? Let’s say Ascalon’s dungeon vendor sells Piles of Crystalline Dust (t6) for 3-6 dungeon tokens.

This way you could directly work on your Legendary without depending on t6-rng drops from laurel vendor bags or drops in general. Do you still need 30 vicious claws? Go to Maaguma zones and do events there. Or armored scales? Kryta it is then.

Happy Birthday!! I really appreciate the work you do, not without criticism here and there sometimes (sorry), but I love you guys.

That hate-bandwagon is quite toxic, I can’t stand it. People gonna hate anything Anet announces at the moment, it seems. BAH. It’s SO easy to hate… >:(

Destai.9603:

You can’t in good conscience say the Living Story compares to the original content and even your competition. The Living Story is one quest every two weeks. One quest.

You obviously haven’t played the game for a while, season 1 had quite a lot of new additions, they were temporary but enough to do while it was live. Season 2 just one quest? What are you talking about?

• a whole new map (DryTop) whith more to do on this map than in 3 classic maps combined.
• Episode 1: Gates of Maguuma added 5 new repeatable permanent missions:
  Disturbance in Brisban Wildlands
  Fallen Hopes
  Tracking the Master of Peace
  Cornered
  Prosperity’s Mystery
  …each of them quite substantial
• Episode 2. Entanglement added 5 more substantial permanent missions:
  Scarlet’s Secret Room
  Discovering Scarlet’s Breakthrough
  The Concordia Incident
  Trouble at Fort Salma
  The Machine
  … so far 10 new missions
• Episode 3. The Dragon’s Reach: Part 1 added again 5 more substantial permanent missions:
  Rallying Call
  Uprooting the Iron Marches
  The Waypoint Conundrum
  Summit Invitations
  Plan of Attack
• Episode 4. The Dragon’s Reach: Part 2 added 4 more of those high quality missions:
  Party Politics
  Recalibrating the Waypoints
  Taimi and the Asura
  The World Summit

so we got 19 story & combat heavy new missions. Compare this to the personal story we got at release. Following a human character in his personal story from lv.1-28 you had to do 15 missions. All in all you go through about 49 missions. This means the content from season 2 has about 40% of the story content of 1 go-through of the personal story. Imho the content also now has a much deeper interesting story and more challenging missions.

… so don’t even start with your one quest, seriously.

… further ideas related to the dungeon-token for events/exploring-idea:

• Put the dungeon vendor also in the map where you get the tokens for doing the events (in front of the dungeon)
• Increase his loot-offer…
• dungeon-specific lockpicks: You buy one for 5 dungeon token (equals doing 5-10 events)
• spawn randomly chests in the map (and the dungeon in hidden locations) which get you 1-2 champion loot bags —> makes exploring much more rewarding
• lockpicks are also rare drops from mobs (higher dropchance from mobs with bonus xp for not being killed for a while)

@Rebound: making every event visible on the map has a few problems:

• it takes out the discovery aspect completely
• it gives incentive to waypointing constantly because when you run all the way the event is most likely over

both horrible prospects, if you ask me

I love the idea of having dungeon tokens for doing open world stuff.

• 0-1 tokens for each bronze-event medal
• 0-2 tokens for each silver-event medal
• 1-2 tokens for each gold-event medal

This would make people who don’t like dungeons (I think there are a lot of those) spread out and look for new events. It certainly would take a while so when people have 50 tokens they might consider trying a dungeon run for the faster reward.

Incentives trying dungeons… check!

And then you can make fragments of tokens (1/2 token) as rare spawns in the zone, in places which are rather far away from hearts and vendors. —> Would make exploration feel much more rewarding. Look for new events or rare token spawns. Very rare spawns could even net you 5 tokens.

rewarding exploration… check!
rewarding doing events… check!

Now that we have sPvP reward tracks so that people who don’t enjoy dungeons also have a chance for that dungeon-loot, wouldn’t it be a good move to reward exploring and event-doing players as well?

having progression towards something via doing events… check!

Lheimroo.2947:

It’s a tough nut to crack, because the idea of a ‘earn anywhere, spend anywhere’ currency is really nice too.. specially for one that’s soulbound and doesn’t experience inflation.

So.. me, personally, I’d let karma be for fairly generic useful stuff.

so it’s a good thing that we have both, generic currencies and specific currencies, everyone is happy

(a few more sinks for the generic currency would be nice though still)

BrotherBelial.3094:

I feel that Drytop will end up Like Southsun. Abandond once the LW leaves there and the prophet you can make from the area drys up. I think if it wasn’t for the back item people would probably not be there now, but the. It might be the best place at the moment to farm karma.

I don’t think so because once you have those expensive rewards you can go for the much cheaper lockpicks. The chests aren’t too hard to find in those sandstorms and you get good loot out of them. + Anet can still add new loot to the hidden chests.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

I haven’t personally implemented all of this content or currency but if I had to guess I would say that this pattern exists because we actually want to give you specific rewards for specific content.

I love this answer… a lot. I always thought that having too generic rewards would be a bad thing for the game because people find that one area where events can be farmed best and ignore all the rest of the world. DryTop was a very good step in that direction imho. Thank you.

I’m confused, wasn’t the next CDI supposed to be about communication?! O_o Well I guess I wouldn’t have had a lot to say anyway except: please rethink the policy.

The system on drytop brings me to an idea how it could be used in zones with meta-event bosses. This would need much more effort from players so it’s important that rewards have to be adjusted considerably.

—> like drytop people will have to do enough events in a certain amount of time in order to start the meta-event chain

What would this solve?

• Meta bosses would feel much more important to that zone
• People would have to work for the chance to fight a boss
• bosses would give much better rewards
• people wouldn’t have to wait 1h before the boss spawns

Anthony, can you tell me why karma seems much less important now than it has been at release? There were a lot of karma-rewards when the game was new but new karma-sinks got quite rare over time. I currently have a lot of karma on my account and besides spending a small part of it for a legendary I have no idea what to do with it. Do you think we will see any new karma-sink somewhere in the future?

I think they should add bonus rewards for lv.80 players to each map.

• get 100% map completion first for that specific map.
• 1-2 random heart vendors have a job for you – a small quest. Guides are useless.
• complete this quest for a special reward (unique skin for each map)
• you can reset that challenge by doing 10 unique events in that zone.
• now 1-2 other heart vendors have a job for you.
• price: 4 champion bags OR a rare/exotic OR 3g

Knaifhogg.5964:

I personally would like to see events displayed on the map zone you’re in

they clarified the reason why they aren’t doing it once: the time it takes you to run to an event far away it is a high chance it’s over when or before you arrive. This would only lead to frustration.