Guild Wars 2

Path Bonus Rewards: Track daily statistics on the # of dungeon paths completed for all servers in each data center and then rank them from most completed to least completed. The dungeon rewards for the most-completed path remain the same (so no nerf to COF Path 1), but the rewards scale up for each path below the most-run path. The absolute least-run path should get a huge reward scale, such that running it once should be worth 4-5 as many runs as the most completed path.

Player Information: The new Herald NPCs or similar NPCs could broadcast to players the dungeon path ranking, so it would be very clear at the 7PM EST reset time which dungeons are giving the most bonus rewards.

Dungeon Variety: The theory here is that the “player market” would balance the dungeons pretty quickly. Immediately you’d see the most difficult/tricky paths least run, but players would rush to complete them for the bonus rewards. But now that they have been rushed by players, they will move out of the “least played paths” and some other dungeon will take its spot. This should add a lot of variety to the paths run by all players!

Least-Run Path Multiplier: It’s possible that even with the new incentive that some particular path might be so difficult that no one will run it at all. I think if a particular dungeon path remains the overall least run path for multiple days in a row, the rewards for it should continue to scale indefinitely until it is no longer the least-run path. Someone will eventually run Arah Path 4 if it is worth 10+ COF Path 1 runs!

Other Thoughts: This idea is based on the world “exploration bonus” XP awarded for killing enemies that have been alive for along time—that isn’t, haven’t been repeatedly farmed. Although ideally all dungeon explorable paths should have a similar time investment/reward, that’s going to take a long time to develop, so allowing the “player market” to determine it might be easier for now, and even in the long term. Going as far as offering a laurel for the first completion of the day’s “Least-Run Dungeon” might offer some more incentive to get folks into paths other than COF Path 1 and AC.

I like the idea of a Daily Dungeon, You do a certain path/dungeon for double the rewards, or a weekly with the same idea you do all paths of say COF for example including story and you get something for completing that weekly bonus. Not only does that get people in dungeons, it also will have more people doing the story dungeons as well. Plus making it a weekly, gives people 7 days to do dungeons so it appeals to a more casual gamer.

This would be a good idea.

Ok, so theoretically the dungeon paths run on average would even out then, correct (in your theory that is)?
After everything gets evened out, isn’t this mechanic kind of useless then?
Just saying why make a new system to encourage people to do tedious paths in dungeons that don’t have time/reward ratio correct instead of making all dungeons all paths time/reward balanced so that they are more enjoyable to do. That’s what Anet is going to do.

Also, I don’t think dungeons should reward any more than what they already do. There’s no point since they give very nice rewards already.

Tahantos.5106:

Ok, so theoretically the dungeon paths run on average would even out then, correct (in your theory that is)?
After everything gets evened out, isn’t this mechanic kind of useless then?
Just saying why make a new system to encourage people to do tedious paths in dungeons that don’t have time/reward ratio correct instead of making all dungeons all paths time/reward balanced so that they are more enjoyable to do. That’s what Anet is going to do.

I think it would still be interesting once the paths even out because, regardless, there will still be a “least run” path every day, so there will always be an incentive to run a “new” dungeon at least once per day.

Marstead.6430:

Tahantos.5106:

Ok, so theoretically the dungeon paths run on average would even out then, correct (in your theory that is)?
After everything gets evened out, isn’t this mechanic kind of useless then?
Just saying why make a new system to encourage people to do tedious paths in dungeons that don’t have time/reward ratio correct instead of making all dungeons all paths time/reward balanced so that they are more enjoyable to do. That’s what Anet is going to do.

I think it would still be interesting once the paths even out because, regardless, there will still be a “least run” path every day, so there will always be an incentive to run a “new” dungeon at least once per day.

If dungeon paths time/reward will be balanced, you can run a “new” dungeon at least once per day anyways since you’d get roughly the same amount of reward from everything.
With this mechanic people wouldn’t run dungeons just because they want to explore new ones, they’d just do it for the rewards. BUT if every dungeon had very similar rewards, then wouldn’t it be way more interesting to “farm” a new dungeon each day AND you can even choose which one.

So there won’t be situations where something like this will happen “Aww man, I gotta do my daily farming… let’s see… least done dungeon… oh ok… arah path 4… but I don’t wanna do that since it takes long and is a bit annoying to do(( but if I want to keep up with farm, I must…”
Here the person isn’t enjoying the dungeon but has to do it if he wants to be most efficient at farming. It’s also a very bad design by default.

Tahantos, yes, that would be the best solution. Sadly I think it is not easily achievable.

Marstead’s solution makes more tedious dungeons more attractive. I would scale it carefully, though, like giving out a bonus of 10 tokens for the least attractive dungeon path (with the least runs finished successfully on that day), 8 for the second least attractive dungeon, then 6, 4, 2. And if a dungeon is still on one of the last 5 places the bonus accumulates. If the dungeon does not “qualify” for a bonus anymore because all run it now, it loses all boni accumulated so far.

You say:

“Here the person isn’t enjoying the dungeon but has to do it if he wants to be most efficient at farming.”

Now the opposite is true (with farming guys, at least): The person who would enjoy the dungeon can’t do it if he wants to be most efficient at farming. 4 hours of Arah for 20 tokens/26 silver are not as efficient as 15 minutes CoF 1 for the same reward.

But of course you are right: It would be much better if all dungeons were created equal. We all know they aren’t and they won’t.

A supply/demand scaling feature for dungeon rewards would be interesting.

But, it would be better, design-wise, for ANet to continue fixing dungeons so that dungeons are closer in difficulty and the paths people dislike start looking more appealing.

Claudius,

A valid point, yes. Even people who would enjoy the dungeon can’t farm it. And a simple 1-10 tokens more wouldn’t be enough. Maybe not even double tokens, since if you want tokens, you want a specific armor, and you’d do that specific dungeon anyway.
They’d have to make the additional rewards pretty big to make the farmer take interest in the dungeon. I just don’t see them putting any more rewards to dungeons… more like adjusting difficulty.

Can’t remember dev names but they have mentioned that it is part of their goal to make all dungeons equally productive. Though they’ll probably keep arah as an exception for people who like them a bit harder.

Arah should be no exeption given that it is required for a legendary.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. Allow an “easy” set of paths and create “hard mode” paths, make them mutually exclusive so if you run hardmode that day you won’t get any tokens from easy mode, and vice versa. Those who want a challenge will runt he hard modes and get more reward for the effort and farmers will run easy modes for any dungeoun.

This also allows those hwo aren’t as skilled to see the dungeouns.

Ok, first of all: good luck to the guy who has to program this. A system with a varying loot table for mobs+champions in every dungeon=daily patch.

Second: the least ran paths are most likely The SE’s ones and the ones in Arah. SE since everybody hates the armor and Arah because they last for hours and fail easily because of the bugs. What’s gonna happen is that a certain exploit is going to reappear rather quickly again if the loot is improved on a certain path per champion. Since your system would only work per dungeon run finished.

Unless you make it per dungeon run started? Which makes it even more ridiculous to actually try to scale loot tables on that.

I like the idea, but most generally, you can’t deny that dailies are something you can get finished in an hour or two at most. It’s a daily, you log on, do your thing, get your (small) reward and log out again. You had your daily portion of GW 2. Not everybody has the time in their day to day life to actually spend hours and hours on this game every day to get all of that fulfilled. People will feel stressed that they need so many hours.

I like the current system, it’s well balanced and the rewards are in comparison to the effort. Giving a reward on top of the reward of a dungeon is in my opinion kinda silly.

I guess you didn’t read that dev post a few days back discussing dungeons and how upping the rewards significantly was not on the table only very minor adjustments like you might get same level blues instead of blues under your level.

Ever since the bean counters took over a month or so ago, drop rates, and rewards in general have gone south. They are simply not going to do anything that will make buying gems to convert to gold a going concern for the TP.

The only way this suggestion will ever see the light of day is after the reward part is nerfed to oblivion or even set back, requiring more runs to get the same amount of loot value. Anet has been saying one thing while doing the opposite lately. They said they were going to improve the dungeons, and what do they do, make it harder for casuals.

This first idea is brilliant. Things will balance themselves out on their own and Anet won’t have to balance rewards vs difficulty as it will self regulate based on which paths are hard enough to scare people away from.

CoF P3 would be full of rewards…

Good idea. Then price of Arah P4 run will be higher and competent players can earn more money, just like back in the days when runners were plentiful.