Guild Wars: Stupid Upgrade System

Okay, so I've been raging against the dying of the light in the PvP side of things lately (Lately? Maybe ever since, oh, June of 2004.) so let's vent the steam pipes about PvE for a little bit. Here's the single biggest thing keeping me from enjoying the campaigns right now: the stupidity of the upgrade system.

Because with Heroes, I don't have just the handful of PvE characters to equip with the right runes and perfect weapon mods with multiple copies so I can swap between builds and roles as the mood strikes me. I have an extra ten characters per each. Because not only does my big, bad Warrior need a perfect sword so, too, now, does every copy of Koss and Goren (And Big Hot Norn Mama whenever I get around to getting GW:EN. Total GILF there. Giantess I'd Love to... yeah, this is getting creepy, right? I started this whole Nora is hot things as a joke but there are people who are actually seriously attracted to a collection of shaded pixels. I need a drink now.). And an axe. And a hammer.

And don't talk to me about collectors and getting max damage weapons, that's the easy part of the equation. No, it's getting the perfect Fortitude and Enchanting and Vamp and Zealous and Sundering and HCR upgrades that's the real sticking point. Those things you can only find by getting lucky with drops while you're farming away or by trading with other players which requires you to farm away to get the gold to meet their premium for the convenience. Neither is an optimal solution for me. Plus there's the whole “standing around in town, watching the trade channel when I could be playing the damn game” factor. We don't have an auction house yet because....?)

Not to mention all the Superior Vigors and Absorption and the various combination of attribute runes that I either need to buy or collect as well. at once excited and depressed to find out that the bottom had dropped out of the rune trade. That Super Vigors were going for a mere 12~14k while still being the marque item. Depressed because I remember dropping something like 75k on one in the open market and being pleased it was a good 5~6k less than the asking price at the trader. Happy because it meant I could finally afford a new one to socket into an alternate set of armor (Because you need an energy set and a health set along with some others depending on your profession. Now that I have a Monk, I need to get four supers into a suit and get my 55 on. Or 135 or whatever the going flavor is these days. Likewise with my Sin who needs a Shadow Form running/farming suit that I can't use for anything else since it gimps me for using an actual build by having way too many Supers and the armor rating of a wet piece of cheesecloth.). But I've come to realize it doesn't matter because the cost to properly outfit my characters with a Superior Vigor now isn't just buying one of them, it's buying enough to lavish them upon my many Heroes. Meaning the price is even greater than it used to be before.

Granted such luxuries shouldn't be easy to come by. You can't pass out the high-end goodies to anyone who stumbles around the game. But the disheartening thing is that I already have all these items. All this stuff is unlocked on my account. I have Super Vigors and perfect Vamp swords and high energy sets and I'm closing in on having the full set of damage-type resistant shields (High reqs only, unfortunately, getting them in the 8~9 req range is the next, even more difficult, step.) but because of customization and upgrading, I only have them in a few places in my ever growing horde of electronic beauties. And I have to go out and find the stuff I already have all over again instead of being able to shuffle it around the server stacks.

It all stems from the same, old system of rare drops and item mods that's long since past its sell-by date. It's not convenient, it serves to reward those who play longer than those who play smarter, and, most damning, it's way too random to rely on. And don't even start to give me that bullshit about it forcing player interaction by creating trade opportunities. You don't talk to the industrial-strength traders who deal in these sort of things you just fork over the money.

What I'd rather have would be an outgrowth of the crafting system. Keep the drops and the un-IDed stuff. But let unlocking a weapon upgrade be like unlocking a crafting recipe. After you get a magic drop and ID, say, a Superior Vigor, you can go to a crafter established for the purpose and, for a significant fee, create a Rune of Superior Vigor whenever you wanted. That rune could be traded to other players, if you liked, which would, of course, keep it locked on their account but still allow them the use of it. There's a problem there with industrious farmers who'd just crank these sorts of things out and ruin the market for everyone else. Deflation sucks. But, well, that's not as big an issue for me as convenience is. This way, I don't have to scrounge for drops and rares and greens for all my many character, as long as one of them gets lucky with an item, then I can transfer that to all of my characters provided I have enough resources. Without breaking that illusion that they're separate characters, even.

Greens, unique weapons, have to be handled a little differently. Having them unlock upgrades would just lead to people farming them over and over. Instead, they don't unlock but if you unlock a special, unique item on your account (Perhaps using whatever lets special weapons get immortalized in the Hall of Meaninglessness.) to the crafter and have them make you a customized copy, if you want. That way, if you've gotten, say, a Victo's Blade or a Khefket's Refuge, you have the blueprint to mass produce it for various characters. You can move onto the next bauble instead of having to farm for it over and over.

But the overall point would be to make it easier for people with multiple alts. People like me. People like everyone who's been playing the game for a while at this point. A simplified, streamlined system to take some of the guess and grunt work out of it all. One that makes it easier once you've reached the summit, not less difficult to get there.