Guild Wars 2

To all other players and game devs alike,
I believe that I am close to understanding the reason behind why diminishing return is not working properly for most people. Before you dismiss this, let it be known as a fact that many players including me have ran different explorable dungeon paths after last night’s patch and received a diminished reward set of 45 to 1 tokens when we should be getting 60, as well as a slash in exp and silver.

I would also like to emphasize that we are not speed grinding these dungeons and most of us have barely run a dungeon for a while since the last last DR patch lost our interest. We also took Mr. Hrouda’s advice to wait until daily reset and server time rolling over before trying our next dungeon run.

The surprising fact is that while some of us received a DR’ed reward set, most of our teammates were not affected at all. In my case, I was the only person in my static party that keep getting DR’ed for every different dungeon path we took.

With all those facts stated, I would like to present my finding for players to shed some light on how DR might work and how Anet’s dev should approach the broken system from.

Hypothesis 1: Diminishing return is character based
Test: Tonight, I decided to give dungeon another try even though I knew that DR had not been kind to me since the patch went live. Last night, we did CoF and I received 45 tokens while my team got 60. We went to TA this time and picked the up path first. We cleared it in a little over 30 minutes. My team all received 60 tokens except me and one of my friend (let’s call him friend A). We received 30 and 45 seals respectively. Note that this was the exact same party that I ran CoF last night with.

Next run, I decided to try something interesting. We picked a new path – forward up this time. Again we completed in a little more than 30 minutes and cleared all objectives without any exploits. When we got the end boss down to about half health, friend A and I switched to our alternate characters and rejoined the dungeon to see how much tokens we would get. This time everyone received 60 tokens and full exp/silver reward.

My little experiment led me to another idea.

Hypothesis 2: Some characters have a bugged diminishing return status on them since the patch that DR was first introduced.

If you consider the possibility of this scenario, we can explain the case of everyone who did everything right but got shafted on the reward. This is 100% true for me since last two weeks!

I hope that Anet dev team can reproduce my test to see for themselves or that other players can chip in their own inputs. Thanks for the hard work!

1) Obviously it’s character based. How else do people speedrun Arah resetting the dungeon by having the group leader relog to an alt?
2) Nope, I did not have a bugged DR status during the path DR was first introduced.

Crackpot theories, are eventually still crackpot theories with no real logic behind it.