Feedback:User/Magamdy/Cartographer: Low-level Arena's

There are total of 4 Pve low-level arenas; the Ascalon Arena, the Deldrimor Arena, the Shing Jea Arena and the Sunspear Arena. Fighting in the arena's will allow you to explore the grounds and contribute to the Cartographer Title. But the problem with the low level cap of these arenas is that there is no way to enter the arena grounds after the level cap is surpassed, thus making it impossible to explore the grounds and thus add it's percentage to the title. You could say that you just need to do these arenas before reaching level 20, but for that you need other people who want to do the same. And there lies the problem. These outposts are deserted. Nobody plays low level pvp anymore, it's as simple as that. This makes exploring these arenas even harder, and not getting those few percents can really get you in trouble in the latest stages of the title (assuming no texmod is used, and that's how arenanet would want it).

Furthermore, a character from one campaign usually reaches level 20 before it travels to another campaign, making it impossible to explore those arenas from the start, which seems unfair, as those characters have an immediate disadvantage when trying to carto that campaign. It's the same with the two starting area's; Monastery Overlook and the Island of Shehkah. These can only be accessed by characters from their respective campaigns. Prophecies characters have a similar area, pre-searing, but the big difference is that it doesn’t contribute to cartographer at all. So prophecies characters have an immediate disadvantage in both Factions and Nightfall cartographer tracks. Technically, only Nightfall characters are able to explore all world maps 100%, since only they have access to the Island of Shehkah, while the Monastery Overlook can be accessed by all characters during Shing Jea Broadwalk.

For a completions like me those covered spots on the map are kind of annoying. I already have Legendary Cartographer, but I still want to explore them. If I already want it for a nice clean map, there must be lots of players who would love to scrape those few percents and help them along in the title track.

So my suggestion is this; put a NPC is each arena outpost that allows you access to the arena grounds. This is both for the sake of cartography and PvP. Cartography for exploration, and PvP so people can take their time to examine the landscape and develop the best strategies. This can either be done through "teleporting" the player directly into the grounds while they stay in the outpost (similar to entering the Shing Jea broadwalk) or the grounds can be made an entirely different (small, unvanquishable) explorable area, which can be left again by talking to another NPC who will take you back to the arena outpost. The same can be done with the starting areas. Just place a NPC in front of them to allow entrance, or just open the gate and make players able to walk right into them.

An entirely different suggestion is to open the old arena's that were closed when the battle isles came, and do something with them, not just for cartography. Turn them into Prophecies-style challenge mission, like somebody suggested earlier. Of course this requires far more time and resources than just placing an NPC, so it doesn’t really have priority. But you once made them to be seen and played, so to see a re-use for them (like Embark Beach uses old Xunlai Market design) would be nice for both of us, and will add a nice extra to the game :)

So as said before, the percents gained with exploring arenas and the other areas can really count in the last stages of the titles, as finding spots not scraped yet on such a huge map gets increasingly hard. Also, since almost every playing attempting cartographer converted to texmod (Cartography Made Easy), this is idea is stimulating for people to attempt cartographer the true way again.

So, yeah I hope this gets implemented as it's seems like a small update that can be added to a new build as a small extra. And that would mean I can finally have my map really clean :D

Magamdy 20:29, 22 June 2011 (UTC)