Guild Wars 2

I really like the concept of not having to rely on luck in order to get a reward or not. The fact that dungeon rewards are not random drops from dungeon bosses, but rather a reward for a specific amount of dungeon tokens that are earned in a specific number after dungeon completition, is great.

However, the current system requires players to grind. The issue with grind (as in, doing content that someone does not enjoy doing over and over in order to get a reward) is that, while it increases the longevity of the game, it is simply bad game design. Requiring players to run a dungeon 6 times or 9 times to get a full armor set would be fine – that would mean playing each path 2 or 3 times, which would be ok. Multiplying those numbers by ten, though…

I have a suggestion to fix this beyond the simple “reduce the token cost of armor pieces”. During the last Beta Weekend Events, the dungeon armors were available in two varieties: a 80 level, more expensive set; and a low level, cheaper set. The cheaper set would be a way to acquire the armor skin, but without the stats; however, using the skin would actually require players to use the level 80 transmutation stones. Those are available from many sources, including the Gem Store.

My suggestion, then, has two steps:

1) Make the level 80 transmutation stones to be significantly less common in the world. Don’t make them rewards for area completition or for anything other than opening Black Lion Chests. This way, other than opening the chests, the only reliable way to get them would be buying those stones from the in-game store.

2) Return the low level dungeon armors to the dungeon merchants.

This way, a player who wants to have a dungeon armor with maxed stats has two options:

a) Grind as many tokens as people have to grind today and buy the 80 level armor set, which would keep the exact same price as those sets currently have.

b) Grind less and buy the low level armor… And, buy or craft level 80 armor, and then use the level 80 transmutation stones to move the skin from the low level dungeon armor to the high level armor. Since level 80 transmutation stones would only be available reliably from the Gem Store, this means more people would buy gems, which would give a higher profit to ArenaNet.

This is significantly more subtle than just reducing the price of the dungeon armors, would make players grind less, and would hopefully make more people buy gems. A win/win situation.