Rewards at Lower Levels (Getting your hooks in)

[Nezuralli.2794]

TLDR Below

I'm a returning player. I took about 2 months off and came back to check out the new raid, then saw new dragon horns and timeguard outfit and spent 1000 gems cause c'mon.

And that got me thinking about what I consider to be GW2's greatest strength when it comes to hooking players in, it's art and fashion. Once you start Fashion Wars 2, the real game begins. So at this point in the games life we've got a very extensive library of excellent skins. Several seasons of Black Lion Weapon sets, Outfits, Miniatures, and a laundry list of end game achievements or "quests" for specialization weapons/armor, Karma skins, Legendary scavenger hunts, and most recently what I'm working towards Sunspear weapons.

I could go on, but suffice to say the end game player is spoiled for choice in the skin market.

But what I've also seen personally is GW2 fail on multiple occasions to actually hook players in. I've bought the game probably 5 times, once for myself of course. I remember having 35$ put towards a pre-order of the game 2 years before the first trailers came out. And other copies to try and convert some of my friends into players. But none of them stuck around past level 40. So what's happening? Most people will just say that the real game starts at level 80. But that's dumb, we all know how much fun games like Diablo are when you're first starting out, getting stronger and collecting loot. Unfortunately I've got no idea how I'd even try to fix the game's loot/progression system without a ton of effort that I wouldn't expect at this point in the game's life.

But I do have an idea on how some early players could get hooked. As it stands most skins are bought, either by Karma vendors in town or at events, the gem store, on the trading post (because the drop rates on exotics in open world are terrible), or Dungeon tokens (which should be sold outside the dungeons as well as in LA btw), etc...

And while it's convenient and fair, it isn't exciting.

Rarely, vary rarely do any of us receive a non basic skin as a drop before we start raiding or getting into PVP, and by that point a LOT of players will not have made it that far before quitting.

I think what we need are those classic moments from GW1 where you're just out questing doing your thing and you kill a named shiny mob and it drops a green weapon (I guess now it would be orange). And we already have the perfect pool of items to use as drops! The Black Lion weapon skins, Karma skins, and Dungeon skins are perfect for this and can even be hand placed into the world at specific events and varying drop rates. To avoid having the prices of these skins plummet due to farming just make them account bound on pickup but also make them very VERY good drops for progressing players to feel good. Imagine starting an Asura and killing the final boss of an Inquest event chain, and you get one of the new MK2 skins as a Level 20 dagger as a named drop that you can choose the stats of.

 

TLDR: I think lower level areas need specific item drops with unique skins to hook new players, easiest way to do this is to re purpose existing skins that as of now can only be purchased and are not able to be earned through game play.