[Milawe]

I'm extremely familiar with WoW's exploration XP because I dinged multiple times with it. We'd be walking around, I'd level, and my husband would wonder why I hadn't trained when we were back in town. ("It's not my fault! The world is making me level!") I have very fond memories of this type of exploration XP.

A Scavenger Hunt not only rewards exploration, it also encourages other players to explore because they're physically seeing many of the "cool" items that they cannot obtain themselves yet. EverQuest 2 has a system where they track the first person to discover an item or craft an item. I always thought it was awesome, and there has to be a mud out there somewhere that does it as well. I've yet to really see a feature in an MMO that wasn't done in a MUD somewhere first. That's probably because game theory and good game design usually go hand in hand.

I think the GW2 and the TSE systems probably work equally well for games where each character can gain XP specifically for exploration. It rewards players individually, right? The results for both systems are the same even though they're coded and designed in different ways. Player A goes into a room and gets some sort of extrinsic reward in both scenarios. What I find interesting about the TSE system is how the percentage is computed and if that percentage changes with the addition of new areas.

One more exploration system that I've seen does not reward a player with XP or items, it rewards whatever player gets to a certain position first by granting them a tactical advantage in PvP. The enemy players that approach that area later gets a nasty surprise and can spend the entire board being at a paranoid disadvantage.