(with the rise of Fractals of the Mists runners, it’s clearly obvious that people can and do run dungeons multiple times hoping to profit. This is one idea I had to increase participation in running the other dungeons for profit as well, increasing overall wealth and trade amongst players for horizontal instead of vertical progression. If you like vertical progression this probably wouldn’t apply to you.)
Here’s my suggestion:
For every single dungeon, there needs to be more of these. Don’t worry too much about correlating it (like if it absolutely needs to be a Gift of Ice to make sense with this “Conjure Frost Bow -like” weapon)… What we absolutely need is more incentive to do the regular dungeons for profit, otherwise people are going to spend much less time doing them.
How it works:
Currently if you want to make loads of profit through running dungeons and creating high-end items, there are three ways to go, Ascalonian Catacombs (which is extremely popular), Honor of the Waves, and Citadel of Flame (also popular). AC and CoF are popular due to familiarity, familiarity due to previously being able to exploit certain things. The other dungeons are only being done on a regular basis by players that want either the armor/weapon skins (TA is popular for the Nightmare weapons), or a specific legendary. The others cannot possibly be done for profit in the same way, which ultimately means that players looking to turn a profit should be doing these three, and so fewer experienced players are in other dungeons to help newbies learn them.
How it should work:
Every dungeon needs to have an incentive like this. Exotic non-tradeable armor skins are not enough incentive! Yes, it’s cool, but it’s not profitable.
Let’s face certain facts for a moment:
1. Humans naturally expect to do some work to obtain any reward, so they’re used to repeating things a few times in order to get better at it.
2. More profit should come from getting better at your job, and doing it more often.
3. Contrary to popular belief, item progression does not have to be vertical to be desirable. In fact this has already been proven absolutely correct with people chasing after Legendary weapons (same stats as an exotic, but really worth the effort to obtain).
4. Volcanus, Foefire’s Essence, Wintersbite, Foefire’s Power, Aether, Azureflame, Mjolnir, Wintersbark, The Crossing, Arachnophobia, and The Mad Moon, all have a portion of the recipe as grinding dungeon tokens.
5. The last 3 on that list were the only ones to be promoted at all by Arenanet, and subsequently their prices are very low compared to what they take to create, precisely because they were promoted in such a way as to let massive amounts of players know of their existence.
What should be done:
Knowing that new weapon skins take less effort to animate than new armor sets, I believe more of these spectacular, tradeable skins like Volcanus need to be put into the game, using various other Gifts. Just throw this concept at one of your weapon artists and see what they come up with!:
1 Eldrich Scroll + 100 Mystic Coins + 1 Gift of Entertainment + 250 Ancient Rifle Stocks = ????
Really, though, the sky is the limit. The whole point of this is that currently you can, for example, grind CoF and make a vial of liquid flame, and if you are hardcore enough to have 50 skillpoints to spare for the scroll, you can turn that into a significant amount of Coin. This incentive needs to be non-exclusive of the other dungeons.
Oh, and one more thing. ADVERTISE the existence of these other high-end weapons, because it gets to be incredibly annoying when people complain about how there’s so little to do when they could easily be building up a collection of these things because of their awesomeness. Seeing a charr guardian Empower a Volcanus firsthand is pretty amazing, but seeing an Arachnophobia on your website was the game-changing move to drive that market out of the shadows.