Guild Wars 2

I understand the need to stop players from farming the same route in specific dungeons and I don’t like that either. However, for the changes in the patch, there are some side-effects that should not be ignored. Reducing the rewards for anything after the first try of story mode would cause players to hestiate to help others, making it a lot harder to find a group to run story mode, because anyone who has run it already would have much less interest in running it again.

Wouldn’t it be better to implement a soft lockout for dungeons? For example,

Another completion of the same route within 1 hour -> 20% reward
within 3 hours -> 40% reward
within 8 hours -> 60% reward
within 12 hours -> 80% reward
within 20+ hours -> 100% reward
Every completion reset the lockout timer.
And you would probably need a UI to manage the timers for various routes in each dungeon.

Making some dungeons insanely hard seems to be not so intelligent. Besides, disparity of difficulty between routes isn’t so bad after all, considering there are many types of players/groups with different level of skills and gears. You can finish route A once everyday until you get your skills/gears for the harder Route B, and so on… If you make every routes the same difficulty, either you can only do ALL or NONE. That is a terrible design.