Idea for Varied Play: Adventure Tracks

[Autumn]

I spend a great deal of time leveling up doing the same things with every alt for accolades. Killing longbow, running mayhems, ghost pirates, vampyri and warwolves, Rikti monkeys, etc. I know I can do whatever I want and then come back and do all these things for zero XP at level 50, but it's really the idea of accolades requiring basically the same thing every time that bores me.

So, my idea: determine however many hours it takes to earn the seven major stat-boosting/temporary buff accolades currently (using alignment-switching) and assemble a selection of missions that take about that long, and award the major stat-boosting accolades around levels 25, 30, 35, 40 of that long mission arc. Leave in space for teaming and having fun, but it should be about 50% of your play time from 1-35 or 1-40. When you begin a new character, you can choose whether you're going to have standard access to accolades through badge work or whether you're going to participate in Adventure Track A, B, C, D, etc. Based on your Adventure Track, you get a contact who gives you missions all around the city, takes you to faraway places that aren't often seen in-game, enemy groups that aren't often seen, etc. Exploration and history badges could be included, but mostly with the idea of getting you to faraway corners of the game world that are well-designed, attractive and interesting.

 

There are maybe 2 or 3 "kidnap/rescue" type missions in a standard accolade playthrough (Fortune Teller, getting stuck with three of them in one Tip mission selection, etc.), and Adventure tracks could include a few (like 2) but not too many (doing them is only fun once or twice a month). They could include SSA content, the new missions that have been added, etc. Make them all take about the same amount of time and track them to see if they need tweaking over time to add or subtract content to make them take about the same amount of time.

 

Ideally there should be at least 4 adventure tracks. Two blueside, one red, one in Praetoria. They should not be strictly linear, but you should have buckets of missions/kill X of Y in every level range (ten tasks levels 20-30, etc.): that way you can team up with friends to complete them but you don't need to be exactly the same level. Maybe there could be eight adventure tracks and four of them would be live every month, or something like that. Maybe half of them could focus on the arcane and half on the tech. The idea is to steer people toward more of the game's existing content that they are probably skipping in order to focus on stat/power accolades.