Guild Wars 2

Warning: There is statistics in the following posts. If you want a TL;DR, read the Introduction, Concept in a Nutshell, and Conclusion. If you want a stats-less post, skip Setting a Baseline and Setting Priorities.

Introduction

Dungeon rewards are garbage. Let’s be honest. People run Ascalonian Catacombs all the time because the paths are easy, and the monetary reward is ridiculous. People just as often only attempt Arah Path 4 to finish off Dungeon Master or because they have the time for the extra challenge.

The problem is, how does ArenaNet assign proper gold rewards to a given dungeon path without immediately causing an economic glut as people flock to the actually-easy-but-not-tried paths? For that matter, how do they figure a proper risk/reward curve at all? Twilight Arbor’s Aetherpath is a textbook case of not worth it, but how to fix the problem?

The answer is something ArenaNet loves: data and metrics.

What Data and Metrics?

Consider the core complaint about dungeons: most of them aren’t worth the reward (chiefly, gold, which is all this suggestion will be concerned about) for the time spent to complete them. So the first data point is time to complete.

The other major complaint about dungeons is that some paths are difficult to find anybody for. You can start up a LFG, and it’ll take a long time to fill, especially if you’re off-peak. So the second data point is popularity.

One concern with any data set is outliers, things that are well outside the norm (imagine a bell curve, now imagine a point at the far right or left). So another thing to address is ignoring outliers. Content and rewards should be, for the most part, designed for the middle 75%, not the 12.5% on either side.

The Concept in a Nutshell

Every week, an algorithm crunches the numbers of how long every dungeon path took to complete, and how often it was completed. Then based on the results, each path has its bonus end reward changed. Less popular or long completion time dungeons reward the most, and more popular and short completion time dungeons reward the least.

Think of it as a 2-axis graph (see attachment, or this link).

(For those mathematically inclined, my fudged numbers are inverse logarithmic, base 10. I’m trying to approximate the left half of a shifted x^2 curve.)

Setting a Baseline

To adjust dungeon rewards based on a given path’s time to complete and overall popularity, first there needs to be baselines in place. More specifically, what are the maximum and minimum gold values that a path should give? At what point is a path “too popular”? What about the time it takes to finish? (These latter two questions actually tie in to ignoring outliers)

Minimum/Maximum Gold: Based on ArenaNet’s own existing numbers, 1g should be the minimum for explorables, 50s for story modes. I suggest that the maximum be 5g/2.5g (very unpopular path, crazy-long to finish…sounds like Arah Path 4…or Arah’s story mode).

Popularity: Capping how popular a path is should be based on the total number of completions across all dungeons. Dungeons themselves likely fluctuate in overall popularity, so establishing a hard number isn’t future-proofing the system.

There are a total of 8 story paths and 25 explorable paths. Considering them separately, that means equal popularity for each would mean 12.5% per path for story modes, and 4% per path for explorable paths. Without having any hard numbers at hand, I’ll just say that double that popularity for a path is maximum popularity (so 25% of the total share for a story, 8% for an explorable).

Conversely, anything at half the average is minimum popularity (any lower still garners the same reward). That’s 6.75% for story modes, and 2% for explorables.

Completion Time: Speedruns are a thing, and while they are great, they are outliers, especially record attempts. Likewise, slower, methodical eliminations of everything that moves are rare.

To avoid having either affect the overall reward curve, only the middle 75% of times should be considered. By that I mean, the 12.5% lowest times and the 12.5% highest times should not figure into the number-crunch.

Setting Priorities

Rewards should be based on completion time first, then by popularity. For instance, almost no one runs Honor of the Waves Path 3, but when people do it, it still only takes a half hour. It shouldn’t get the same reward (nowhere close) as Twilight Arbor Aetherpath, which likely takes 2 hours (I haven’t done it since release, truth be told).
With that in mind, think of the overall reward total as being decided in two parts. The first part is the average completion time, which will set between a 1.5g and 4.5g reward in 7 increments (every .5g).

Going back to the data, after throwing out the outliers, the reward should be based on where the completion time is compared to the average of all paths. Here’s a fudged example of it, using the increments 50%, 75%, 100%, 150%, 200%, 250%, and 300% of the average completion time (see attachment, or this link).

Having gotten the base reward, popularity is allowed a 1g “swing”, .5g up or down. 5 increments this time, allowing for even numbers. NOTE: the following graph is logarithmic. I’m assuming that popular paths have more LFGs, causing more people to join runs and creating a runaway effect compared to less-popular paths.

(See this link)

Combine the two, and the reward range of 1g to 5g exists, with potential values at every .25g level.

The same idea can be applied to story modes, with all values halved.

Other Implementation Possibilities

The suggestion as presented assumes a week-by-week reward adjustment. There are several other ways that the idea could be implemented:

1. Computed daily, taking into account the past week’s data. This is a smoother adjustment, creating the effect of a rolling average. The downside is that the “reward meta” is less likely to change as players are slow to “catch the wave” of good rewards.
2. Computed weekly, taking into account the past 2-3 weeks’ data. Bumpier than the first, but gives more time for players to adjust the meta with popularity shifts.
3. Computed daily or weekly, taking into account all data ever with a weighted average. This is a far more complex (and more demanding) way to run the numbers, but it leverages the full dataset. I think this would be complete overkill, but it’s a possibility.

Advantages

There are a lot of advantages to changing a dungeon’s bonus gold reward based on how the player base itself completes them:

• It smooths out the risk/reward curve, or in this case, the time/reward curve. With the right data, it won’t matter what path a player picks, it will reward roughly the same as another path with a different time to complete.
• It rewards speedrunners while not adjusting the system based on them. A speedrun team will finish a path faster than the average group, but they’ll get the same reward. And due to their speedrun, their actual completion time stands a greater chance of being ignored by the algorithm when generating the next week’s values.
• It dynamically adjusts to the capability and interest of the player base. Other than fine-tuning, implementing something like this is fire-and-forget. If everyone binges on dungeons one week, then barely touches them the next, the algorithm will adjust to proper values on its own.
• Due to the factor of popularity, paths may change in vogue from day to day as players try to maximize their reward. This could create a “rolling meta” of which dungeon paths are popular and which aren’t.

[Example: if the Aetherpath is 5g in total reward this week, a good number of people will try it, upping its popularity, and maybe even dropping its completion time. Next week, it could be 4.25g instead, while Arah Path 4 comes back to 5g since everyone dropped it (at 4.5g) in favor of Aetherpath.]

Programming Difficulties

Like any suggestion, implementing adjusted dungeon rewards will take development time. In this case, the difficulties revolve around data and number-crunching:

• Right now, the number of times a dungeon path is completed and how long it took to complete may not even be tracked. Adding these in as metrics to track would be the single hardest obstacle.
• Establishing an automatic server process to crunch the numbers at an appropriate reset time and readjust the reward values for a given week. The upside on this is that raw number-crunching is a computer’s forte, and wouldn’t take that long at all to execute once built.

For the core idea, that’s it. Creating the database and tracking the data, then crunching the numbers once a week. Maybe if the resulting numbers don’t match what ArenaNet would like to see there would need to be some adjustment to the algorithm, but beyond that, it’s relatively simple to create.

But since there’s a good chance this data doesn’t already exist, the algorithm will need to be seeded with a decent pool of data. Turning on the tracking a week or two before the rewards actually adjust would accomplish this.

Conclusion

Dynamically adjusting the amount of gold a dungeon path rewards based on how long it takes to complete, and secondarily how popular it is, will help reduce (or even eliminate) the cries of dungeons not being worth it, or of certain paths being way out of line for what they reward. By applying the player base’s own metrics, it leverages the advantage of taking such metrics by providing better rewards to that same player base.

This is a very interesting idea. Would you advertise the reward for a path somewhere ingame, so people can choose depending on the reward, or would you not show it and trust that people will assume they can do any path and be properly rewarded?

A problem with this is that it will mess with the economy, which Anet won’t like. Dungeon running looks like it will be much more profitable and good speed clearing groups will have a major advantage, because the hardest and longest dungeons are also the ones where speed running is more effective and makes more of a difference. Because the reward will be based on the average runtime, the longest dungeons will now be the most profitable and the difference in gold earned between semicasual runs and speedruns will be at a maximum. I myself think being good at the game should be rewarded, so I like this, but I don’t think Anet will.

I agree that such a solution would fix the balancing for gold rewards

With it in place, I still wouldn’t like the dungeon rewards though.
At this point I don’t care about gold anymore. There’s simply nothing left to buy which would interest me and I hate that pretty much every long term goal in this game has you grind exclusively for gold.

I want to be rewarded with things unique to the content I got it from, be it skins or whatever. The fractal capacitor would be a great example of that

Sure, there are dungeon armor sets. But someone who regularly played PvP and Dungeons since release will have gotten all the ones he’s interested in ages ago

I agree that I’d prefer unique rewards that aren’t pure RNG (there are extremely rare recipes for some nifty accessories…the resulting items make boatloads on the TP because of their sheer rarity), but at least with an approach like this the “there is no point” complaint goes away for most of the player base.

Unique rewards that aren’t based on vanishing RNG? That’s another idea of mine…that I’ll type later.

You forgot something very important even though it’s very interesting : Anet doesn’t care anymore about dungeons. They’ve just abandonned dungeons and fractals and will let them be as they are currently.
On this aspect, GW2 will permanently be a game in beta.

Any reason why you would track both completion and time to complete?

What I would do:
- If a path is ran more than on average, decrease its rewards
- If a path is ran less than on average, increase its rewards

Wethospu.6437:

Any reason why you would track both completion and time to complete?

What I would do:
- If a path is ran more than on average, decrease its rewards
- If a path is ran less than on average, increase its rewards

You know what, when we suggested anet to add substantial gold rewards at the end of dungeon paths we specifically emphasised that these rewards should be tied to the frequentation of the path: a market-based reward, just like you are suggesting.
You could check my posting history and the patch notes: it was after this suggestion that anet implemented this.

But they implemented only half of it.

What happens when you implement half of something? European crisis … huh I mean, it simply doesn’t work. Typical Anet.

I believe that over more than two years the number of good suggestions has been maximum, but the decline of the game remains unhindered. Sometimes I wonder if Anet really wants to make it work.

Fantastic post. Couple of things.

1. Can the data be “manipulated”?
2. Would it be wise to implement (unless it already exists) a daily cap on these adjustable rewards? Whilst it would benefit the speedruners, you don’t want them running a path unlimited times during the day getting 5g.
3. Putting the above point in reverse, would 5g for an initial reward followed by a % reduction per run after be a better solution? (doing this would mean adding in a player metric for how many times a dungeon has been run per day/per account.
4. What effect would this have on the economy? GW2 runs off its economy and people buying gems to convert to gold (amongst other things). Having this much of an influx of gold would push people towards dungeons on a mass scale, reducing gem purchases.
5. What about fractals? increased reward for fractal level?

I don’t think this could be manipulated. There are too many people running dungeons.

And there already is a diminishing returns on dungeon rewards. You only get the full reward for a specific path the first time each day you run it

utred has the right of it. This suggestion only applies to the bonus path reward, so subsequent runs are just the 26s+20 empyreals+20 tokens.

And manipulation would be extremely difficult, because I’m almost positive my popularity metrics for some of the dungeons (CoF 1, the ACs) is low-balled. The less-popular dungeons that people might try to manipulate by AFKing in will hit lower popularity and longer time anyway due to their sheer length and difficulty (Arah 4, Aetherpath). Also, there’s the 12.5% cutoff on both sides to remove most of the manipulation effect.

EDIT: Fractals…I’m thinking something slightly different, because of the randomness factor. Maybe if people really like this one I’ll write that up.

Its a nice idea. I think anet wanted something like this but never done. Btw no afk cheat (or much less) if you count only with finished dungeons and you cut down the slower (and maybe faster) 5-10 percent as you suggested

As the player base adapts dynamically, often finding new tricks and builds, the rewards should be dynamic too.

To many people only do 1-6 paths daily out of all available paths, then the more people does those compared with the rest, those get reduced rewards up to a minimum lower cap. Very few people does certain paths, then those should get bonus rewards the less people do them, up to a maximum upper cap.

Manipulation of such as system would be highly unlikely, because the paths less done are less done for a reason. No matter how many people you convince to abandon those paths, since rewards would be based on comparison with other paths, things would always even out thanks to people ignoring the trends.

There should also be a reward for doing all paths, kind of like the storybooks in GW1. It could be an infinite version of of the Dungeon Master achievement. Once all paths (including story) are done once, the achievement is completed, and it gives AP (up to a cap of 200-500 or so) and a bonus container with some extra gold and a stack of blank tokens you can exchange for particular tokens by taking with Dougal Keane, as he’ll get a vendor choice to open a merchant dialog in which the blank tokens are used as currency.

I would like this idea if they eliminated the problems some of the dungeon paths have.

Why does no one run SE p2? That’s not because reward/time sucks, that’s because the escort event bugs out half the time making you reset the path. Why does no one run Aetherpath? Of course I can speak solely for myself but the rewards/time are okay but it’s simply not fun. (Unskippable cutscenes, huge timegates, boring puzzles)

Other than that I like that more difficult paths (like HotW) would get a better reward than easier ones (like AC).

Cheezy.2039:

I would like this idea if they eliminated the problems some of the dungeon paths have.

Why does no one run SE p2? That’s not because reward/time sucks, that’s because the escort event bugs out half the time making you reset the path. Why does no one run Aetherpath? Of course I can speak solely for myself but the rewards/time are okay but it’s simply not fun. (Unskippable cutscenes, huge timegates, boring puzzles)

Other than that I like that more difficult paths (like HotW) would get a better reward than easier ones (like AC).

Exactly this. Before ANet should even bother with such complicated systems, they first need to actually fix their dungeons. Because face it, even if they make SE P2 or Arah P4 worth 4g a run, while nerfing AC paths to 1g, in their current state nothing would change.

I agree that OPs post is too long, so for me, it’s TL;DR. So my questions (sorry if it’s covered)
a) Did you consider economy impact of your reward system? I saw some gold rewards up to 5g, how will this impact the normal players, the dungeon grinder, as well as those gem-2-gold converter (and vice versa)? In the end, will this result in gold inflation even more?
b) Did you consider hard core grinder and manipulator? Where in players will intentionally and openly (i.e. map chat, guild chat, 3rd party forum posts) advise to prolong certain dungeon/paths (say CoF paths) to artificially increase the rewards in future runs?
c) How will this affect casual gamers? If they can only do certain paths and if the rewards are dynamic, what if they always end up playing during the reward reset (i.e. always getting the lowest reward)?

In the end, I don’t really care how Anet changes the rewards AS LONG as it will not affect the economy. For example, if it rewards stuff that can’t be sold nor forged nor salvaged, in short, can’t be turned into another currency (gold or otherwise) then it’s fine for me. Your rewards drastically changes the gold reward for example (and maybe others too, dont know coz I didnt read all) and I am greatly wary of how this will impact the economy.

Dungeons are too rewarding for such easy content. They inject way too much gold into the economy. If dungeons need anything is a nerf in the gold per hour. Either reducing the gold or using mechanics to make them longer.

xDudisx.5914:

Dungeons are too rewarding for such easy content. They inject way too much gold into the economy. If dungeons need anything is a nerf in the gold per hour. Either reducing the gold or using mechanics to make them longer.

What do you think should be the most rewarding content then? Certainly not open-world farming Silverwastes or something.

xDudisx.5914:

Dungeons are too rewarding for such easy content. They inject way too much gold into the economy. If dungeons need anything is a nerf in the gold per hour. Either reducing the gold or using mechanics to make them longer.

If you take out gold from dungeons legendaries will be 1k in stead of 3k and players will still have the same troubles making 1k gold instead of 3kg

It will make basic items harder to get than easier, Cult skins will take 3-4x longer to get etc…

Gold isnt the problem, the game will be based around gold if gold, is needed. Instead of more or less gold rewards we need more Non gold rewards, like special skins, AP, titles and minis.

Cheezy.2039:

xDudisx.5914:

Dungeons are too rewarding for such easy content. They inject way too much gold into the economy. If dungeons need anything is a nerf in the gold per hour. Either reducing the gold or using mechanics to make them longer.

What do you think should be the most rewarding content then? Certainly not open-world farming Silverwastes or something.

Open world farming is not giving straight up gold. Most times are items that players sell for gold, therefore they are not injecting so much gold as dungeons.

Faux.1937:

xDudisx.5914:

Dungeons are too rewarding for such easy content. They inject way too much gold into the economy. If dungeons need anything is a nerf in the gold per hour. Either reducing the gold or using mechanics to make them longer.

If you take out gold from dungeons legendaries will be 1k in stead of 3k and players will still have the same troubles making 1k gold instead of 3kg

It will make basic items harder to get than easier, Cult skins will take 3-4x longer to get etc…

Gold isnt the problem, the game will be past around gold if gold is needed, we need more Non gold rewards, like special skins, AP, titles and minis.

Yes but it balance the rewards. Dungeons are only behind fliping trading post, almost forcing anyone that wants gold to play that.

I do like this idea. As bad as Archeage was when I tried it, this suggestion seems similar to their pack trade-in for money scheme (which was good, imo). Every pack (dungeon) has a base amount of gold depending on how far (long) it takes (which could be set weekly). You could look at any time to see what the percentage payout for that pack (dungeon path) would be, ranging from 130% if the pack had few recent deliveries, down to 70% if many people were taking that route. There still ended up being a few outliers, but I feel it gave people incentive to experiment with paths in order to drive every delivery to the same payout per expected time (including failure risk).

Wethospu.6437:

Any reason why you would track both completion and time to complete?

What I would do:
- If a path is ran more than on average, decrease its rewards
- If a path is ran less than on average, increase its rewards

This should end the thread. How much a path is run nicely aggregates the relevant information for you.

Anyway, looking at how the previous dungeon rewards were revamped, I think even this would take more work to implement than the devs are willing to put in.

xDudisx.5914:

Dungeons are too rewarding for such easy content. They inject way too much gold into the economy. If dungeons need anything is a nerf in the gold per hour. Either reducing the gold or using mechanics to make them longer.

I’d be ok with nerfing the dungeon pure gold reward a bit and giving out “heavy crafting bags” instead. Of course that would have effects on the economy as well by increasing supply on materials causing their price to fall as well as the lower amount of gold in the economy it’d be quite interesting to see the effect that would have.

In any case I think dungeons are pretty perfect as far as their rewards overall, some need more, maybe a few a little less, but on average dungeons are just about right. SO if they did lower the pure gold reward they’d need to replace it with something to keep it a valuable avenue to build up your account.

TaCktiX.6729:

… It rewards speedrunners while not adjusting the system based on them. A speedrun team will finish a path faster than the average group, but they’ll get the same reward. And due to their speedrun, their actual completion time stands a greater chance of being ignored by the algorithm when generating the next week’s values. …

Systems that reward speedrunners are half of why I don’t do dungeons. A system that disproportionately rewards speedrunners is a system that rewards “elite” players for kittenish behavior towards “non-elite” players. If a speed-runnable way to get the same reward exists, then new people get kicked from dungeon teams. If a speed-runnable way to get the same reward exists, anybody who didn’t copy-paste their build off of MetaBattle gets kicked.

I’m really not crazy about any system that back-loads the rewards. I know that they made the dungeons so crazy long and so crazy big that nobody has time to clear every trash mob between the path beginning and the boss, but I’d rather see that fundamental design flaw fixed (via what Carbine, a rival NCsoft studio, is now calling “boss in a box” designs that have shorter maps and a lot fewer trash) than see endless putzing around with the existing instance designs.

They didn’t even bother adding new daily dungeon rewards. I doubt they’ll do anything with them.

Negativity aside, I think the best system would simply be one that worked like ArcheAge’s trade routes. Trade routes provided a bonus reward, ranging between 70% to 130%. The more a route is run, the more that bonus is decreased which naturally would lead to riskier and more time-consuming paths providing the biggest gain.

Good post OP. It’s a little late in the game to overhaul a reward system when there are other areas that need immediate development. The time and resources needed to overhaul dungeon rewards lacks the ROI in my opnion.

Vix.6730:

Good post OP. It’s a little late in the game to overhaul a reward system when there are other areas that need immediate development. The time and resources needed to overhaul dungeon rewards lacks the ROI in my opnion.

But this approach only requires programming (and a fairly simple algorithm at that) and maybe tracking some new metrics on the database side. It’s deceptively simple compared to adding more unique skins, or full clear rewards, or any of the other number of suggested dungeon reward fixes.

I agree that truly overhauling dungeon rewards in sum is lower on the priority list, but this is a quick stopgap to make any dungeon worth doing regardless of its length.

Nokaru.7831:

They didn’t even bother adding new daily dungeon rewards. I doubt they’ll do anything with them.

I have to admit I am quite puzzled over how Daily dungeon paths weren’t included, yet Fractals were. I’d have thought a “Daily Detha path” would be a nice way of spurring players to complete paths that they wouldn’t normally attempt.

TaCktiX.6729:

Other Implementation Possibilities

The suggestion as presented assumes a week-by-week reward adjustment. There are several other ways that the idea could be implemented:

1. Computed daily, taking into account the past week’s data. This is a smoother adjustment, creating the effect of a rolling average. The downside is that the “reward meta” is less likely to change as players are slow to “catch the wave” of good rewards.
2. Computed weekly, taking into account the past 2-3 weeks’ data. Bumpier than the first, but gives more time for players to adjust the meta with popularity shifts.
3. Computed daily or weekly, taking into account all data ever with a weighted average. This is a far more complex (and more demanding) way to run the numbers, but it leverages the full dataset. I think this would be complete overkill, but it’s a possibility.

…

I’d go for a daily computed adjustment that takes all data ever into account. It isn’t even that hard to implement.
You just take the data from yesterday with a 10% weighting and a saved value that represents all the days before that with a 90% weighting. That way the influence of one day dimishes slowly over time and adjustments are fast enough if fundamental changes happen, but slow enough to not feel bumpy while everything runs normal.

The influence of one day’s data over a course of 10 days (roundet to two digits after comma) would be as follows:
10% 9% 8.1% 7.29% 6.56% 5.90% 5.31% 4.78% 4.30% 3.87%

The code would be:
completionTime = (completionTime * 0.9) + (yesterday.getCompletionTime() * 0.1);
popularity = (popularity * 0.9) + (yesterday.getPopularity() * 0.1);