Guild Wars 2

Hey Folks,

here’s an outline of the patch notes for dungeons this week. The full patch notes can be found here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/Update-Notes-September-25th-2012/

Dungeons
General
• Updated vendors in the Ascalonian Catacombs and Caudecus’s Manor to sell level 80 versions of their unique skins rather than level 60 and 70. Players who purchased the level 60 and 70 versions will soon be given the opportunity to upgrade those to level 80 without having to use transmutation stones.
Citadel of Flame
• Fixed an exploit in Magg’s chain that was allowing players to skip the entire dungeon and still be rewarded.
• In Magg’s chain, if Magg happens to die in the lava field, he’ll teleport himself to the start of the area just outside it.
• In Magg’s chain, Magg must be much closer to things to draw their initial aggro. This only affects the escort to the magmacyte rock.
Caudecus’s Manor
• Fixed an exploit that was allowing players to skip content.
Honor of the Waves
• Fixed a bug in the Butcher’s chain that prevented a boss from spawning.
Arah
• Fixed a blocking issue.
Ascalonian Catacombs
• Fixed blocking bugs in Detha’s chain.

Dungeon Rewards
We’ve made some significant updates to dungeon rewards. I wanted to try and clarify them here. All of these changes have been the result of an original exploit which was letting players receive upwards of 20 levels by completing a single dungeon run. We initially closed this exploit, which caused some new problems. The result is this new system which should increase dungeon rewards for players who play though them normally but help curb inflation of rewards for those who are using exploitative methods to farm them.

1) Dungeon tokens are now rewarded at the end of an explorable chain. This was done to stop players from repeatedly entering a chain and farming the first boss that dropped tokens rather than playing the entire chain. At some point in the near future, we will make up for this by making dungeon tokens a rare drop so that even players who are not completing a chain can make partial progress toward the rewards.
2) Dungeons reward 20 tokens for completion and now reward an additional 40 tokens for the first time they are completed each day. This means that if players can complete all 3 chains of a dungeon in a day, they’ll receive a total of 180 tokens, which is enough to purchase some of the smaller rewards.
3) Dungeon tokens should be account bound. This will allow players to have a single character farm tokens for their other characters.
4) Last week, to limit the most extreme cases of dungeon speed-clearing, we introduced a system to limit rewards for rapidly repeating dungeon clears. However, a bug in that system caused it to impact more players than intended. This week, we’re updating the system to not impact clearing different chains of the same dungeon. We’ll continue to evaluate this system in coming weeks.

1. on the Reward section is a bit lacking in hard numbers and facts that you all no doubt have. We won’t be posting the way this system works due to it being an anti-exploit system, so that people won’t easily find ways to circumvent it.

If you are experiencing Diminished Returns, it is due to clearing dungeons too quickly. If you feel you are unfairly being punished by our DR system, please post about it and we will review it when possible to see if the system is working as intended. The more info you give us the better.

JonPeters.5630:

I just wanted to update everyone on where we stand with this. So far we have found a single bug with the system that is causing certain players to get stuck in a state of reduced rewards without actually exploiting. A fix for this has already been made and is being tested locally now. We are going to do more significant testing on this new version but we also believe it is more bulletproof to begin with. Please keep posting data as these cases are somewhat rare and are hard for us to find with internal testing but seem to be exposed quickly when thousands of people are playing the dungeons. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Dungeon-Patch-Discussion-9-25-1/page/6#post262602

All rewards are susceptible to our code that is dealing with people who are speed clearing dungeons. This means that if you are speed clearing and then play some new chain for the first time it may not reward the full 60 tokens. If you find yourself getting less rewards consider whether or not your rate of dungeon completion is extremely high.

Jon

A bit of misinformation I am seeing in the threads is that if you complete a single dungeon in ten minutes, we’re going to punish you for it, as though we are punishing you for being “too good” at it. This is not true.

Our DR system combats repeated runs, and has a global presence as well effecting other dungeons. So if you run multiple 10 minute dungeons, back to back then you are going to get hit with the DR system no matter which paths you choose.

However the notion that your group will be punished for clearing any single dungeon in any amount of time is incorrect. Running through multiple speed clears back to back will result in the DR system influencing your rewards.

We have identified an issue with the DR system that is causing the bug of rewards being incorrectly diminished. We’re actively working on the situation in anticipation for Monday’s scheduled patch.