Guild Wars 2

Hi. My guild and I make it a guild event to hit up all 3 paths of AC multiple times in a night. We’ve gotten so good at it that we can clear the dungeon, any path, in 20-25 minutes. We clear all bosses, including the Spider Queen, Lieutenant Kohler, Cave Troll, and all relevant event bosses. The only part we run is the scepter piece collection event on Hodgin’s path because that’s the easiest way to approach it and arguably less dangerous than trying to fight all of the scavengers.

Every night, however, we move so fast that we get smashed by DR after the third run. 30 tokens, then 15, and so forth. We’ve gotten in the habit of going afk mid-run and making sandwiches as we wait for time to pass. I must confess that this waiting is really boring and takes a lot of the enjoyment out of the game. It breaks immersion and in general ruins the dungeon experience (almost as much as getting reduced rewards does). I am fairly certain that killing every boss and completing every event as intended, just really fast, does not constitute as exploiting the dungeon, so maybe this thread will help the developers better tune the timing of the DR system so that legitimate runs don’t get hurt by it. I don’t mind the existence of DR as an exploiter-deterrent, I only don’t want it to hurt legitimate players as it still can.

Thanks in advance for any adjustments made and/or discussion on the matter.

Just wanted to point out that this has now begun happening on CoF runs too. We’ve been able to do entire runs of CoF in 15-20m as a guild without skipping any events or anything whatsoever, and get DR’d to kingdom come as a result. (Paths 1, 2, and 3)

It would be really awesome if facemeltingly good teams were not punished for being so good. The game, as it stands, currently rewards being mediocre, and not being exceptional.

I have to agree with this.

Why are people getting punished for getting good at playing the game and doing dungeons? To top it off you don’t even know when or if you’re going to be punished until it is too late. If you have hit the DR you don’t even know it until the end of the run and by that point it’s too late. Why isn’t there a visual indicator? Any type of warning would be greatly appreciated for as long as DR is going to exist based on how fast a dungeon is run.

I have had this happen several times and it’s very frustrating to have wasted a dungeon run getting 45 tokens instead of 60 because you’re too fast and you should have somehow magically known that you had hit the mysteriously hidden DR timer. At that point you have to wait until the next day before you can get more tokens and you can’t even continue doing other dungeons or paths because you’ll get even less for completing those.

As it stands people need to run a dungeon on different paths 23 times if they want to acquire a full set (more if they want weapons, want to get the gift for legendaries, or just like running it and can decide if they want to gear new alts or something later). People are naturally going to get good at doing them if they run them so many times and will start running them faster. Instead of feeling like they have accomplished something and have gotten better at the game people are getting punished. This does not make sense.

Like the OP, I understand that the DR system on successive runs was designed to prevent exploiting but I have to say that that is a completely ludicrous band-aid solution at best. The DR system doesn’t solve the problem of exploitation and it never will. People who exploit will always exploit when the option is available. They will learn how many times they can run something before they get hit by DR and they will stop and wait for the next day. In the mean time people who like running dungeons and want to keep running them are the ones getting hit hardest by the DR. The solution to exploiting is fixing the exploits not taking away the earnings of people who are running dungeons legitimately. If Anet still isn’t satisfied and wants dungeons to take more time then why not add content to them? See which ones are being finished the fastest and add an extra boss, a new wing (or reuse one from a different path, if you absolutely cannot afford the development time), new enemies, different mechanics… something. Don’t just tell us sorry you don’t get rewarded for your efforts you should have known better than to be good at the game.

This isn’t to say the DR system is completely useless and needs to be burned at the stake. It is very effective at getting players to run different dungeon paths and different dungeons altogether since their rewards get reduced to 20 after running a path. This is good as it gets players to try out more dungeons. This feature should stay but the band-aid solution to exploiting needs to be seriously looked at.

Simple answer: they tuned a timing to put an end on speedfarmers and players who skip.
Who, in large majority, are pugs, not high-perf guilds.
And i truly prefer a system under control, more than make happy 4-5 uberfast top-end guilds

So then why not at least give a visual warning of some sort? Let us know that we need to wait before we run another one. We have no way of knowing when this is going to hit us.

I too prefer a system under control but perhaps it’s better to control it by fixing exploits, and making the act of skipping trash or even some bosses impossible as opposed to slapping a DR timer on which cares not for how people are completing dungeons or who it affects. This would also make not only those “uberfast top-end guilds” happy but also you and everyone else happy.

MAybe it’s a bug, they have said constantly that you should not get DR after doing only one run in less than 30 minutes. That the DR kicks in if you do more than 2 runs per hour so the DR should kick in in the third assuming it took you less than 1 hour to finish the first 2 paths

Rising Dusk.2408:

… The only part we run is the scepter piece collection event on Hodgin’s path because that’s the easiest way to approach it and arguably less dangerous than trying to fight all of the scavengers….

This.
Stop skipping mobs that are IN your path (I think it’s ok to skip mobs that are not in your path, there are some in some dungeons) and when you’re clearing the dungeon in less than the DR system kick-in time I’m going to agree with you.

If you skip mobs you’re still speed-clearing and this system is made to stop it.

p.s. 30 tokens? the second time you do an explorer path you should receive 20 token, not 30.
In a post a dev said: 60 tokens first time you do a path in a day, 20 tokens the successive runs.

I haven’t had the instance of running in to DR on dungeon runs, as I barely do one a week. But, they could easily add a check list of sorts that shows each boss being killed to give credit and your token reward is based on what you killed. They could make the “random” bosses (ie troll in AC) give extra credit. The other system I’d suggest is just to add in good old fashioned cooldowns/lockouts. Based on reading here and my limited experience, a good 30 minutes is fair enough. I think the best reported times I’ve seen are some 15 minutes. So that group would have to wait a whole 15 more minutes (woe is them).

Yes 60 tokens first time you do a path in a day, 20 tokens for the successive runs. This post is not, however, about repeating paths.

What the OP is referring to is diminishing returns for running a path for the first time in a day. When you hit the DR your dungeon reward goes from 60 to 45 and the next dungeon you run continues to drop further and further.

Again this has nothing to do with repeating a dungeon path more than once in a day. This post is about DR affecting the token reward when doing multiple paths in multiple dungeons.

Why do you skip mobs in AC by doing the scepter-run?

Do you exploit? Not even the lava-room you have to escort Magg through in CoF? First time I’ve been there was with a PUG, we didn’t know the exploit or the strategy. It’s doable, even under these conditions. But it takes some time. Do you do it legit or do you run onto the rocks on the far side of the room?

The DR system just seems buggy for some people. Today I cleared all 3 paths in AC with a nice PUG in under an hour with none of us hitting the DR (since I was reading the forums I was actually kind of shocked we didn’t hit it), but I’ve heard stories of people taking longer and hitting it. We skipped the spider, troll, and lieutenant mini-bosses.

One of the first times I’ve skipped those. One of the PUGs wasn’t in it for the badges (he had a mountain of them) and was just in it for the fun and didn’t find the skippable mini-bosses fun. Neither did anyone else really, though personally I find the lieutenant entertaining but for whatever reason there’s a pile of bugs with his name on it.

To top it off you don’t even know when or if you’re going to be punished until it is too late. If you have hit the DR you don’t even know it until the end of the run and by that point it’s too late. Why isn’t there a visual indicator? Any type of warning would be greatly appreciated for as long as DR is going to exist based on how fast a dungeon is run.

Agreed. I’ve done AC a fair number of times but only with pugs and I always feel like I’ll be punished if I happen to meet up with a really good team after reading the developer posts on the forums. Though so far I haven’t hit the DR myself.

To humor the users saying that you shouldn’t run the scepter-part-collection area, I did a run last night with my guild on that path where we melted every single mob in the way, troll, Kohler, random squads, and even champions that were out of the way. It took us 24 minutes, and doing all paths this way resulted in us hitting DR. Skipping bosses we can get the run to 15 minutes, but we’ve stopped doing that because quite frankly we want the tokens, but the DR system punishes us either way.

Having said that, I want to emphasize to people that “killing everything” is not how you solve all problems in dungeons. Many events intend for you to kite and survive a given amount of time (timed rituals / bomb placements), or try to test your ability to kite by making enemies overwhelmingly numerous. If the developers wanted us to kill every enemy in the scepter-collection event, they would have made the scepter pieces drop from the scavengers, not have them sitting on the ground. Collecting things sitting on the ground is not an exploit, nor should it be punishable by DR. I invite any ANet developer to correct me if they feel otherwise.

For reference, when my guild gets hit by DR, we don’t get 45 tokens at any point. It goes like this: 60 (first path) → 60 (first path) → 30 (first path) → 15 (first path, different dungeon).

I really honestly don’t understand why we have this system in the first place. I really really don’t.

Tokens are rewarded upon completion of the final boss in a path. That’s fine. If a person or groups of people are good enough to run those paths quickly, whatever. I don’t care. Why does Arenanet care?

I only see this system as a way to increase the longevity of their game, making it take longer for people to get the gear and skins they want.

But I ask, for a game that’s free to play…….who cares how fast someone is able to do something if they do it legitimately?

Is Arenanet somehow losing money from people getting what they want quickly?

I truly don’t understand.

For me, I feel the DR doesn’t even solve issues, but just creates more and since it’s implementation is less of a tactic against exploiting and more of a tactic to increase longevity, I have to wonder whether or not they’re confident that there’s enough content in the rest of the world they’ve created to keep players occupied.

Because like I said…..

It’s a F2P game. So who cares how fast you’re able to do something if you do it legit?

Think about it. You can’t exploit anything anymore if the tokens only come from the last boss. That should solve the issue right there. Undiscovered bugs notwithstanding.

So why have the DR? Why is speed an exploit?

Longevity is the reason.

And that shows a lack of faith in the content you’ve created and how long it can truly attract people.