Guild Wars 2

I just posted this on Reddit but I thought I might share my ideas with the dungeon community to see if there’s any interest in my proposal, please comment with any flaws, improvements, criticisms or agreement with this, and maybe we’ll be able to come up with a better solution and actually convince anet to do something about it :P

I think at this point a lot of people have realized that the dungeon community is basically dead and the only people attempting to do dungeons are those farming for tokens or newbies who want to try out their first dungeons. With fractal rewards being generally crappy at this point in time writing, most people with little time to spare or those who enjoy ‘challenging’ content without the need for a full 10 man party and hours of dedication available to do raids are basically screwed out of their money making sources. Therefore, I propose a few suggestions to help rebalance dungeon rewards so that people are not completely focused on farming them or selling paths for gold (which I assume is why Anet decided to ‘deincentivize’ them in the first place).

My solution: Merge or scale rewards for lowmanning.

Many veteran dungeon runners are at this point, capable of soloing or lowmanning dungeons. In fact, they’d rather solo or duo for the extra challenge. With the fancy buffing of most classes and the inclusion of elite specializations, dungeons are basically a brain dead activity for a full man party, if it already wasnt before. So, if the point of nerfing rewards because dungeons are too easy with too much payout, keep the current rewards per person, but divide the rewards from any ‘free slots’ in the party to the available party members. For example: If a soloer manage to finish Arah P2, which current payout is 1g and 60 tokens per person in a 5 man party, this person would instead get 5g and 300 tokens if he finishes the dungeon as the only person. This would lessen the incentive to sell the path because the rewards will get divided back into 5 people if he finishes the path with a full man party. Which means he’ll retain the 1g and 60 tokens that he would’ve gotten if he ran it with a 5 man.

This change would not only give people who enjoy dungeons an incentive to run them again, they would also challenge any dungeon farmers who have been running in a low skilled 5-man environment to up their game by actually learning the mechanics of the dungeon bosses. Running as a solo-duo also takes a fair bit more amount of time in completing content compared to a 5 man, and with the extra skill and time required for lowmanning, it’s only fair that the payout is increased.

Asides from that, Anet has already showed us that tweaking the rewards for dungeons is not a completely difficult task to achieve. Unlike the many suggestions for a challenge mote that requires a complete overhaul of every dungeon path, this only requires some tweaking in the dungeon reward programming that could also be used/transferred towards fractals (Lowmanning Fractals and selling them on LFG is also currently still a thing). Im not a programmer so I can’t say this for sure, but I’m fairly certain a simple tweaking of the reward balance is much more simpler than making a “Hard Mode” for all 8 dungeons.

Tl;dr:

Pros:

• Rewards people who are skilled and spends more time completing the dungeon
• Challenges people to learn dungeon mechanics and improve skill for more rewards
• Deincentivize dungeon selling on LFG
• Fair rewards for 5 man parties and low man parties
• Provides fair content for people who do not enjoy group play, or lack the time for hours of raids or HoT map metas
• For Anet, don’t have to spend that much time ‘fixing’ dungeons

Cons:

• Anet actually has to touch on dungeons again lol

I don’t think Anet is ever that generous on giving out rewards. So I don’t find it likely.

It probably have more to do with financial reason than technical reason. If you really want to get more rewards get 4 more accounts. Anet might be happier since you need to spend money to buy 4 more copy.

I love the idea of incentivising the low-manning of dungeons, as I think it’s one the most enjoyable things to do currently in the game. That said, having 5x reward for solo runs seems a little too good, particularly as solo runs are usually only a little bit slower than full party runs due to a large amount of time being spent running between bosses.

Also as you say, dungeons right now seem to be full of two main types of people: experienced players going for dungeoneer and completely new players going for dungeon master. If you add something like this to the game, those experienced players will just disappear into solo instances and never show their faces on the LFG again, because let’s be honest; who wants to have to carry clueless newbies through a dungeon when you can do it yourself easily and take their reward?

Even if I have a group of 5-experienced players, we’d probably agree to just each solo the dungeon to gain a total of 25x the normal daily reward. Or even worse, just 5 man it to the end and drop out leaving one person to get the full clear, then repeat 4 more times for each member. You’ve basically cheated the daily limit to gain 5x the usual amount in just a single day.

It might work, but I think it’d take quite a large effort from Arenanet to ensure it’s not exploitable and/or damaging to lower level players, something they clearly aren’t willing to do.

laokoko.7403:

I don’t think Anet is ever that generous on giving out rewards. So I don’t find it likely.

It probably have more to do with financial reason than technical reason. If you really want to get more rewards get 4 more accounts. Anet might be happier since you need to spend money to buy 4 more copy.

If you think about it, 5g for 15-30 mins work on Arah p2 as a solo player doesnt even come close to many of the farms available out there. It is even daily-locked so you cant run the same path over and over again to get their rewards. Most paths however only reward 33 silver at this point, which if you are able to solo it, you’d only get 1.65 gold out of all the time you spent. In fact, the average soloer would probably take 30 minutes to an hour to complete a path, 1.65g to 5g an hour is not very rewarding at all. The system I propose is just to get players who are still interested in soloing to continue soloing, not completely for the rewards, but for the challenge and interest.

AnariiUK.7409:

I love the idea of incentivising the low-manning of dungeons, as I think it’s one the most enjoyable things to do currently in the game. That said, having 5x reward for solo runs seems a little too good, particularly as solo runs are usually only a little bit slower than full party runs due to a large amount of time being spent running between bosses.

Also as you say, dungeons right now seem to be full of two main types of people: experienced players going for dungeoneer and completely new players going for dungeon master. If you add something like this to the game, those experienced players will just disappear into solo instances and never show their faces on the LFG again, because let’s be honest; who wants to have to carry clueless newbies through a dungeon when you can do it yourself easily and take their reward?

Even if I have a group of 5-experienced players, we’d probably agree to just each solo the dungeon to gain a total of 25x the normal daily reward. Or even worse, just 5 man it to the end and drop out leaving one person to get the full clear, then repeat 4 more times for each member. You’ve basically cheated the daily limit to gain 5x the usual amount in just a single day.

It might work, but I think it’d take quite a large effort from Arenanet to ensure it’s not exploitable and/or damaging to lower level players, something they clearly aren’t willing to do.

1) If you think about it, 1.65g (which is the reward for most paths for soloing in my proposal) is not much at all in our current economy. Asides from the extra time needed to solo, a soloer would need to know the mechanics of the boss and not just spam all their skills like what a normal 5-man can get away with. And even if they’re good, with the lack of DPS and variety of boons/utilities that are vastly available with a 5 man group, a 30 second fight can last up to 5 or more minutes per boss when soloing, considering you encounter many bosses in a dungeon path, thats a lot of time added.

2) Most experienced players I know going for dungeoneer or farming for tokens for other reasons rather do lowmans with other experienced dungeoneers than join a full first time newb group. Of course, there are those who are willing to mentor the newbies, but i find in my experience, having newbies in the party are more of a burden than having a free slot. Those who can’t do dungeons solo (good at 5 manning but bad at solo/lowmanning) will still join casual 5 man groups just for the ease.

3) You’re right at 5 experienced players soloing to get much more personal reward, but the fact is if 5 experienced players team up together, less skill is needed and the dungeon is completed in about less time and effort required, therefore less payout is simply fairer in that sense. If they do it 5 times in a row to get 1.65g for each player, or 5g (for arah p2 and p1), then they are still rerunning the dungeon for x5 the time required for every player to get their reward, and to be honest, running a dungeon path 5 times daily for 5g per person can get stale. I can see this being exploited however, and this is a good call out, perhaps not allowing people who enter or run dungeon paths more than once daily can circumvent this issue.

Dungeons are dead. They won’t ever touch them. Deal with it.