Guild Wars 2

Recently Robert Hrouda noted that ANet did not want to have universal dungeon tokens (which could be spent on any dungeon gear you wanted rather than being specific to a single dungeon), in part because this would lead to players farming the easiest possible dungeon to farm, rather than working on the more difficult ones. I think I have a way to temper that player reaction.

I’m going to make a suggestion that would be ridiculous if you guys weren’t already halfway there. Have a player-based token exchange system. Do it like the gold/gems exchange mechanism, but for dungeon tokens. Make it so that if a player has a bunch of tokens from dungeon X, and they need a bunch of tokens from dungeon Y, they can trade them in via the BLTC. But since, as you point out, people might find ways to grind some dungeons easier than others, there would be a commodity exchange rate, such that the tokens that are in easy supply would swamp the exchange, and tokens that nobody went for would be more rare, and therefore the exchange rate would skew towards those.

So that way, if Dungeon X was ground like mad and people were dumping thousands of those tokens onto the market, while Dungeon Y was very hard and almost nobody was offering tokens, then you might need to chip in dozens of X tokens to get any Y tokens. This would discourage people from grinding Dungeon X, since while it might be faster the tokens they received would be of lesser value, while they would be encouraged to work Dungeon Y, since despite the time and difficulty involved, the return on the tokens would be worth the costs.

Not only would this give players a lot more flexibility and allow them to offload tokens that they don’t need, but it would also give ANet good feedback as to which dungeons are easiest to grind, and which tokens are less desirable to the community.

The whole point of Dungeon armour was that you get rewarded for putting your effort into it, not that you bartered some currency in one form or another from other players to achieve it.

it would also give players the ability to “manipulate” the market as some more-skilled/more-organized players can go for the harder dungeons and set prices at a much higher rate than others.

i give a thumbs down, like what rizzy said, dungeon tokens are rewards for YOU, for the effort YOU did into that dungeon, not what some other person did.

The whole point of Dungeon armour was that you get rewarded for putting your effort into it, not that you bartered some currency in one form or another from other players to achieve it.

The whole idea of this is that you’d have to put in the same effort regardless. This would in no way cheapen effort. All it would do is give you options. If, for example, you really wanted one dungeon’s armor set, but didn’t want to grind at that single dungeon dozens of times, you could instead run each dungeon a couple of times, and then convert all those different tokens into the ones for the gear you want. Or maybe you really enjoy one dungeon, but don’t care for the gear type it offers. This would allow you to run the dungeon that you enjoy, and get the reward that you want for it.

You’d still have to do the same amount of work, you would just get to choose which job you wanted to do that work at.

it would also give players the ability to “manipulate” the market as some more-skilled/more-organized players can go for the harder dungeons and set prices at a much higher rate than others.

I don’t see how players could significantly manipulate the market. It’s supply and demand. If only a few players are running a given dungeon and offering the tokens on the market then the prices of those would go up, as they should. If a ton of people are farming a given dungeon and flooding the market with tokens for it, then the price would fall, as they should. How would you alter that dynamic in an artificial manner?

This is a very interesting idea. I like it. +1

It may even encourage folks running old dungeons as new ones come out in expansions. Most instanced areas suffer from decay when newer stuff comes out. No one needs/wants the old dungeon gear because there is better.

With the DTE, as new content comes out, new tokens will appear on the market and folks may run old content to farm up the tokens for the new content. This would allow new players who have not seen older content to get groups etc.

I see how inflation may occur, as elite guilds complete content they will have a surplus of higher level tokens and can release them as they see fit, possibly inflating/deflating the market however this is normal in any economy.