Content-Driven Achievement Rewards

With the Wintersday festival coming on December 16, we’re releasing a new version of the daily achievement system. With this new system, we want to give players the opportunity to try things they may not normally experience and feel like the rewards they earn for doing so mean something. Rather than having a generic reward for all achievements, each one will give players something that is thematically tied to the content they’re playing. Completing a fractal daily achievement will get you an extra pristine fractal relic, some additional agony resistance , and a tome of knowledge; taking a tower in WvW for an achievement will grant you World vs. World experience and additional badges of honor; or capturing a point in PvP will give you additional reward track progress. We want the rewards to help drive players to the content, not general rewards for all achievements.

To help accomplish this, we’ve broken the daily achievements into three distinct categories based on their game types: PvE, WvW, and PvP. Additionally, we’ve created a separation of easier achievements like “Killing 3 Players in WvW,” and more challenging ones like “Win 1 Match in PvP as a Mesmer” or “Defeat the Shatterer.” Easier achievements are quicker to accomplish, but harder achievements will give players greater rewards.

As part of this change, we removed achievement points from the individual dailies. In the past, if you wanted to max out your achievement points, you’d have to do all ten daily achievements in a day and run all over the world. Instead, we’ve created a new meta-achievement for completing any combination of three daily achievements from any category. Completing this meta-achievement will award you a flat 10 achievement points that count toward your daily achievement point cap. So now players concentrating on achievement points only need to ensure they finish three daily achievements. Players will earn rewards other than achievement points if they complete additional achievements; you can do more achievements if you’re excited about the additional rewards, but you don’t have to feel pressured to do all of them every day to reach your achievement point max.

With the launch of this new system, December will be the last month to include monthly achievements. The monthly achievements provided larger goals to players but were still fairly generic and repetitive, and they don’t fit well with the new reward paradigm. Because some of you have already made progress on your monthlies, we will leave them in for this final month, allowing you to earn bonus laurels.

Finally, in a release coming early next year, we will merge the existing daily and monthly achievement point caps into one pool. This will allow players to continue working toward the maximum point totals for the daily achievement system without the existence of monthly achievements. “What about the rewards from the existing daily and monthly achievements? What about the laurels and Mystic Coins?” you might be asking. Well, fear not!

Log-in Rewards

One of the things we want to do is reward players for being fans of Guild Wars 2. So we’ve moved the original rewards from daily and monthly achievements, thrown in some new items for good measure, and combined it all into a new bonus system that rewards players just for logging in to the game. The first time you log in each day, you’ll receive a new bonus reward. The items on this new reward track are not only a combination of the previous daily and monthly achievement rewards but also some additional items we’ve added, including bags full of trophies needed for crafting and an exotic equipment chest guaranteed to give you an item for the profession of your choice.

One way to think of this is like a holiday calendar that gives you a new present from ArenaNet each day. There are 28 individual rewards on the track, each one building toward an epic chest containing a permanent 1% increase to account gold find and your choice of either ascended crafting materials, materials necessary for crafting your legendary weapon (including mystic clovers), an additional sum of laurels, or tomes of knowledge.

Missed a day because of work, vacation, or a work vacation? No worries, your progress is still there! The next time you log in, you’ll pick up where you left off. The system will only reset once you’ve claimed the 28th and final reward.

With the new daily achievement and log-in reward systems, players should have more things to do each day and feel more rewarded for being a hero. Happy achievement hunting, and we’ll see you in Tyria!