Greibach wrote:
Maybe if there were some fun little random things you could do to your personal instance/guild hall (say gardening, construction projects, whatever) that you could watch happen over a period of time, but that could keep improving while you are out of game, it could be kind of neat. They would have to be things that had no gameplay impact (IMO), but that could be interesting.
This was my first thought as well, and something I think would be really cool. Like paying for something to be built in your home district in Divinity's Reach, or some sort of magical experiment in your own asura lab that actually takes a week of real time to complete. I like how in Eve Online, building the ships in the Titan class takes about a month of real time. Now, I never played Eve, but this concept really appeals to me. It just adds so much more incentive to make something good of what you've paid for, because you not only spent in-game gold, but you actually had to wait a long time for it. Heck, I wouldn't be opposed to waiting like a
couple of months for something, if it was cool enough.
I don't know about offline leveling though. Somehow, it feels like cheating to me. I
guess it would be fine for secondary characters, but I still feel like I wouldn't have earned that level. If you team up with a level 75 character, you would expect that person to be able to handle that profession, and actually pull their weight in, say, a dungeon. If 35 of those levels were acquired through offline XP gain, the actual experience of the person playing would be equal to a level 40 character, equipped with a bunch of traits they haven't really gotten the hang of. In a tight spot (and it sounds like there will be lots of tight spots in GW2) people you play with need to know their abilities. I don't know. Maybe this is a groundless fear. What do you guys think?