For the most part, people run dungeons for the rewards or the skins. Right now where it stands, CoF is the fastest dungeon for time/effort to gold ratio. People will tend to go towards the path of least resistance. This was apparent when world chests events rewards were buffed, and everybody was there for a chance at rares/exotics.
I’m sure ANet is re-working and re-designing some of the dungeon encounters as we speak (update to A/C, and CoF P2). However, even with new encounters and changes to dungeons people will look for whatever is most efficient in terms of gold or rewards. So in other words…. show me the loot.
Here’s an idea I had in regards to turning more people into the dungeons while at the same time throwing some rewards in there that isn’t RNG. The bags of gold, karma, and 3 tokens were a step in the right direction.
There are 8 Dungeons (not counting fractals) currently in the game – I will associate each dungeon with a type of crafting material as an example attached.
In addition to receiving the tokens, depending upon your character level that you complete the dungeon on in either story/explorable mode, you would receive the loot table’s crafting material and tier. This also spreads people out into various parts of different dungeons as the materials may be more desirable depending on what you are looking for. You’ll notice that I put Ancient Bones as a reward for CoF since that is likely the most run dungeon daily.
This is just an idea and I’m sure would have to be account bound per day per path so that the rewards wouldn’t be abused in some way. The same would have to be done with the quantity of said materials (maybe 3?) as well. This would give some incentive to people for running different dungeons and guarantee them another form of reward.