GW maps : Created for scenery rather than exploring

One thing I have found lacking in GW is the maps, as exploring turns up nothing. My Guild allies are happy to explore, but I have no interest. You know that no matter where you wander, there'll never be anything exciting to find. Compared with RPGs like Morrowind or Baldur's Gate, where you might stumble upon a fancy weapon, GW's low quality random drops seem only to serve as money.

I suppose my frustration is moreso on account of most maps having crazy twists and turns in the routes you can take, so even though your destniation is just over there, it's a sixteen mile trek around three mountains before you can reach it.

What would be nice is if exploring found vantage points for missions, or turned up hidden allies and villages and stuff, or had famous weapons - a goal or reward if you will. It'd be nice if when going to take on an enemy force, scouting around was firstly possible without you being led up a straight path into a head on encounter, and you could say find a high up cave and rain firey death from above. Play smarter as it were.

Yes, I must confess the maps are either 1) Too Linear, but with enough twists, turns, and invisible walls to make you go mad, because where you want to be is about 4 feet below you and in front, but you have to go 2 miles around to get there, or 2) Have many places to go that lead to precisely NOTHING.

you must understand that GW maps are no different than other MMO maps in terms of excitement. you guys are complaining because you have read spoilers...would u kno where the temple of ages was without ever looking at an explored map or asking people? i dont think so. there are plenty of vilages, quests, monsters, and items that are way out of the way of the missions. you only think its uninteresting because you already kno whats out there

Not really. I played through without reading FAQs and such, and it just got OLD walking tens of thousands of miles and not really being rewarded for it. I just never thought about it before. I have to agree with these guys. Aside from making more of the map visible, I see no point in exploring.

What we're saying is that we would like rewards for going out of the way, instead of going from point A to D, we want to go to A, B, C, F, M, and then D, and be properly rewarded for our mob-fighting efforts.

The problem with adding more towns way out in odd places, is people will explore them, post their findings, and pretty soon, everyone will know.

Actually, what would remedy this would be if those "dead ends" in the map contained something like a huge mob of monsters slightly harder than the rest of the area, accompanied by a "Boss" named monster, who upon killing, may actually have an elite skill that you can capture, or have a better chance at dropping something nice.

Oh wait..