Guild Wars 2

At the moment, dungeon design in GW2 promotes exploitative play, where players do things the designers never intended in order to do it as quickly as possible.

There’s a few problems with this, on both sides of the fence.

The vast majority of players in this game are obsessed with rewards and will take the path of least resistance in order to obtain them.

The developers overtune content and are never able to really balance it properly, as the defined norm when playing said content becomes the exploitative method. This results in no feedback on content that may very well be badly balanced, such as annoying amounts of high health trash mobs in between the “fun” bits of a dungeon.

This further drives players to find ways to exploit the dungeons and avoid having to do such dreary content.

So I propose that in order to make sure ArenaNet get some actual valuable feedback about precisely how badly some dungeons are designed, they apply “Painkiller” style blocks to dungeon segments.

For those of you unfamiliar with the FPS Painkiller, it used a mechanic that stopped progress until everything in a particular area was dead. If you tried to skip content, you’d just come up against impenetrable barriers that wouldn’t disappear until you’d killed everything.

Of course, this would cause uproar amongst the community and a massive amount of complaints about dungeons, but that’s the point.

If you try to play a dungeon “normally” at the moment, you’re fully aware of just how tedious they can be. If everyone in the community was forced to play this way, ArenaNet would finally get some useful feedback.

Mungrul.9358:

Of course, this would cause uproar amongst the community and a massive amount of complaints about dungeons, but that’s the point.

Your plan is to annoy as many people as possible? I thought ANet were already doing that…

I like skipping trashmobs. They get boring really fast.
You don’t like skipping, for whatever reason.
Currently I can play the game my way, you can play the game your way.
Everyone is happy.

…why should I be forced to play the game measured by what you think is “right” and “wrong”?

This would only be helpful if the trash mobs had decent, if any, drops. Right now you can kill all the gravelings you want, and you’ll get literally nothing but headaches for it. I’m not a fan of being forced to kill everything in an area in the first place. Wastes a lot of time with trash mobs that, like you said, have annoyingly high amounts of health.

This can all be traced back to the fact that the loot system in this game is so bad it’s not even worth it to take 30 seconds to kill trash mobs.

That’s a problem that has been ignored time and time again.

Ech, guys, I’m not saying it to punish you, I’m saying it would be a good way to highlight exactly how bad trash mob design is.

I hate trash mobs between bosses too, but as players have found various exploits in order to bypass them, no-one’s really complaining, so ArenaNet don’t think there’s anything wrong with the way they design dungeons.

The purpose of this suggestion is to force players and ArenaNet to acknowledge how bad the design is.
If we don’t force them, they’ll just continue delivering mediocre dungeons that encourage players to exploit.

Running past mobs is not an exploit! It’s a risk you take if you want to save time, although in some cases (e.g. AC or CoF) it can be much easier to run past than to fight. The problem is that in only a few places (dredge at the end of the dredge fractal) is it worth killing the mobs for their drops.