Which is still bad.
I quit GW 2 the moment I was expected to collect Mushrooms that were "highlighted" for me to pick.
I ask a question... WHY?
Why do I want to pick 6 mushrooms?
Why?
Why is 80% of my time is based on very stupid reasons to play. Why should I kill X creatures and collect X apples? That's it? That's what games should be?
That kind of thing keeps players busy doing retarded errands and not interacting with other players.
I'd rather be given the freedom without any neon-signs or "objectives" but with rich lore in the world and plenty of dungeons to explore (for adventurous players) and of course the options to do other things (outside of exploring and adventuring).
I'm not going to collect 6 mushrooms ever again nor I am going to kill 10 rats just because I'm supposed to. It's over for me.
While I certainly prefer the "auto-questing" to "zomg! exclamation point!", many of the area quests in GW2 do lack a sense of purpose or cohesive story arc. As a result, I have been kicking around an idea for how I would improve upon the system:
I imagine a game world that is somewhat like "Eve-like but in fantasy", in that there are three large cities with dozens upon dozens of outlying villages. Each village has resources nearby, unique event sources (e.g. goblin cave, faerie mound, whatever), and starts with no alignment. Players can band together to gain control of a village. Villages that are adjacent to one of the city-controlled areas can align with the city and build reputation until their land is considered part of the city-state proper territories. All (GW-2 style) event quests in the area are basically a way to help out your village: escort quests are there to help establish trade routes, gathering quests build wealth, slaying quests clear areas for development, other quests may help build the local militia adding troops or equipment, and many quests build renown for your village with the target city. Players would build faction with their village by binding to a village, making it their home, setting up a shop or farm/garden, and by logging out in the area (yes, building faction just by living there); faction would give you access to village resources like the blacksmith, etc where you could get better gear, etc.
Villages that didn't align with a city faction could form independent states (low-sec) where the rule set was different. When you were in city controlled lands, you wouldn't be killable unless you were KOS to that city. In independent villages, it would be open PVP. That said, you would take faction hit for killing anyone aligned with that local village and they would take a faction hit from your home for killing you; these would be larger faction hits based upon proximity to your city. Killing someone of the opposite faction would build some faction with yours. Player boosted faction would need to have a decay function to prevent people from easily maxing out with their city through PVP exploits. Out of this, teams could naturally emerge as a result of who kills who and who is aligned with who rather than "For the Horde!". Killing someone would be something that you thought about carefully because they may cause a faction hit with a place that you wanted to keep friendly. Full scale invasion of another village would allow one team to outright capture another village, leaving it in a state of anarchy for few days before it shifts alignment to have (weak) faction aligned with the conquerors, which would then need to be built from scratch.
The yin and the yang of the two would be that most of the villages would be pretty crappy if you never did PVE-style investments in building out the area while the threat of PVP conquering was always very real no matter where you were outside of the major cities themselves.
GW2 events would spawn out of the local monster factory (faerie mounds, goblin caves). Leaving them alone for a long time would build and build them (think inactive goblin cave -> goblin scouts -> goblin patrols -> goblin warband -> goblin army). This would give the "omg, centaurs attacking!" events in GW2 more life as it would seem more like centaurs were amassing in the forest until their tribes built up enough that they decided to attack the local village. The ability of the local village to repel the attack would be (a) based upon the direct involvement of online players who killed centaurs, and (b) based upon the cumulative support of online/offline players who had built up the resources of the village to build up their automated defensive capabilities.
