In a slower development MMO like this player made content should be a thing

[Glider.5792]

They could have made it, so that players could make custom SAB worlds (most of SAB assets could become decorations), and "host" them in a same was as custom arenas work. Maybe a player could buy an "empty plane" for like... idk.. 100-500g, where he could put a start-finish, checkpoints, and all other decorations and mobs. There would be some limits, but other than that, player could make any world they wish.

[starlinvf.1358]

@"Danikat.8537" said:It's not just the GW2 community. In my experience it seems to depend on the type of games the person in question is most used to playing, and is particularly common among MMO players because so many MMOs rely on their reward system to motivate players, in some cases including motivating them to do things they explictly do not find fun like grinding the same area over and over to artifically increase the amount of time they have to spend playing and therefore pay a subscription for. I find it strange as well, because my mentality is pretty much the opposite - I play games because they're fun and I do things in those games just because it's there to do, I almost never worry about what the rewards will be until afterwards, except in rare cases where I go looking for a specific item I want. I don't think I've ever wanted to check before accepting a quest or whatever to see if it's a good source of XP or gold, or if the rewards are useful, I just do it and decide what to do with whatever I get afterwards. But I've learned that there are people who will worry about that even in single-player games where it doesn't really have any impact.

I have a bit of insight into that. Fun can be considered an element of a reward system just as much as any intangibly tangible item. "Fun" games without rewards are better described as the catharsis experienced by the outcome of the activity, which itself is actually a purely psychological reward. Physics games tend to get the most mileage out of this, because its limitations are inverted by nature. IE: physics game play have to explicitly define limitations, where every other type of interaction has to explicitly define whats allowed.

MMORPG and RPG-lites are most heavily defined through white listing actions (literally programming them in), and directly prevents outside solutions. So to get anywhere, players have to exploit loop holes in how the rules are defined to break/beat the design intent. Since this inherently limits their freedoms, players will naturally turn toward Power and Economics to solve their problems. These 2 things are easily held hostage by the Devs, but struggle with a common problem associated with that kind of Oppression...... How to keep the villagers down, but not so much that they revolt?

With GW2 specifically, our power is capped quickly, and heavily across the game.... so that shifts nearly all of our attention toward the "Wealth-based" Reward system. Cosmetics are just an extension of that, since status and expression are a form of social currency. Solo players don't realize it, but they are also enslaved to same system, because they are their own social circle. However, there is a second and third element that puts a lot of overt emphasis on the TP and Liquid gold. Element 2 is the amount of things integrated into the game's Crafting system. Crafting was clearly tacked on later half way through development, since the game's drop system runs almost in direct odds with it. In fact, its obvious they had started with GW1's trophy system to create the gear upgrade path, which was later consolidated to Karma, and the Drop system expanded to include armor. Element 3 is the TP creating a ubiquitous value for liquid gold as a major trade medium, where other games tend to put more trade value on items and barter more as a result. Gold may still act as a frame of reference..... But the main reason MMO inflation happens is rooted in how very few items have real value to the playerbase (often being drop only), leaving little reason to spend gold on anything else. If you look at how nearly all micro-transaction models have a separate currency that is normally there to bypass the economy, its an immediate admission that the Devs don't want you to actually value it. In a lot of models, they're trying to be their own gold sellers.

The Gem store is an oddity, and actually rather cleaver, in how they use the "own gold seller" model to promote the gem store itself. Normally the Secondary Currency is sold as the solution to "the problem" of the game, where the Gem exchange is sold as the solution to the inaccessibility to the Gem store exclusives. What bit them in the ass is that the Gem store is loaded with too much exclusive value, so almost no one want to sell their gems, but nearly everyone is willing to buy them off the exchange. That gap increases the more the devs try to leverage crafting as a gold sink, because gems can't be sold for enough gold to be worth it. The cheapest legendary weapons are $50 based on the exchange rate, while the Gen 2s (being 2500g) is around $120. We make so much gold (even outside of festivals) that any project under 150g is considered Accessible, while anything under 30g is Trivial.

To us..... most item rewards are worthless, because our gear system plateaus so quickly. And the crafting requirements are so well distributed, and demanding increasing volumes of raw materials, that we'd take ages trying to gather them ourselves. The TP's ability to deal with both of those problems, the ability to sell off items we don't need for a useful amount of gold, and gold being the only medium it uses, we end up with a huge emphasis on having substantial amounts of liquid gold for its flexibility within our economy. The usefulness of Items/Materials constantly ebb and flow.... but Gold is always useful. This is how Economies are supposed to work.

[dodgerrule.8739]

I completely agree that we should be able to submit ideas or plans for content to anet

[joneirikb.7506]

One of the things I've been pondering lately is how it would work to make an MMORPG without the usual rewards, so basically no XP or Gold. I think it could have been an interesting experiment, but I also expect that 99% of current MMORPG players would hate it on sight.

MMORPG's seems to be targeted specifically toward grinders by nature. So even a game like GW2 where you technically don't need to grind anything at all, it's full of grinders, that been asking for more and more grindy "content" since release.

[Trise.2865]

Here's the thing: it does.