For the fifth Guild Wars 2 expansion, I spent some time on the Rewards team helping to setup the new economy. This included redesigning aspects of the fishing economy to feel more rewarding and exciting, designing on the rewards for the hidden Kodan Caches and the usages for the currency found from them, and creating new merchants in the game to encourage player to interact more with the game's economy.

Kodan Cache Economy

In a different page I talked about how I designed the Kodan Caches but specifically how I designed the system for their distribution. Inside their physical distribution is the wrinkle of the rewards contained inside. Since the economy of the expansion actually relied on the coins given in these chests it was important that I made the easiest to find chests still reward quite a bit, with the extra rare chests needed to be incredibly rewarding. The extra rare chests also needed to be open with a key which could be bought from a vendor who existed just for players to turn in their found coins + other expansion specific materials. All of this meant that I needed to create a spreadsheet and math out the impact that these rewards would have. I created a breakdown of averages, lowest estimates, highest estimates, etc. then used this to balance. Since I made the spreadsheet easily interactable / easy to read it then was used to justify the design to other members of the team or use it as a jumping off point for their future designs. This also made us easy to map out exactly how much a player would need to engage with the system to reach a goal we set for them in the vendors wares.

Fishing

We had gotten some feedback from players that fishing was a "grind-fest". For an activity which is based off a real life grind-fest this was a sort of compliment, but it was clear that the economy could be improved. So, I pushed the team to let me add in more fun aspects of fishing such as a "daily catch" that could be sold for a big reward. Another thing I did was design a more noticeable ecosystem, so players were encouraged to move around the map and hone in on specific areas to find the fish they were hunting for. This along with creating more noticeable day/night cycles for the fish made them more fun to find and exciting to receive as a reward. After these changes I talked more with other members of the rewards team and we agreed that we could also rebalance fishing to be more rewarding across the board. One team member pointed out that some fishing holes don't have the same bonuses as others just cause they are freshwater, so I made those easier and more rewarding to offset that. I also designed the drop rates to provide more rewarding rare fish to keep players hooked for longer while they keep searching for the ultra rare "chase" fish. Fishing is a mixed bag for a lot of players and the hope was that this incremental change would allow us to continue to improve fishing and learn more about what players liked and didn't. It does seem like these changes were mostly well received.

Merchants / Vendors

For the new expansion I handled the map specific generic vendors, this included the new designed ones for fishing, the typical ones seen across each expansion, and flavor ones for the quests / etc. This required that I coordinate with some of the other teams such as quest design to make them fit the world, and also work with the rewards team to see what we could improve on from the last expansion. Being that the vendors served as a sort of hidden progression system I had to understand what exactly we could and couldn't require from the players. I would make a rough estimate based off what we needed to change and what we had done in the past, then I would review it with the other designers. A wrong value could send the economy into a tailspin and so it was important that we were very delicate. So this was less about designing new things but ensuring a continued stable economy / progression track for the player.