Guild Wars 2

A lot of people have expressed concern in the current dungeon reward system since the latest updates. I have a few ideas which may be similar to many others, but I would like to get out there hopefully in time to possibly be an influence to a slightly different system. Some of these go for the open world as well, but the main focus is dungeons.

1) Never ever ever ever programmatically lower rewards based on how good someone is at something. If people find a way to clear a dungeon quickly, let them take home the rewards for doing it. But now is your turn to decide if either they are really that good or your dungeon isn’t hard enough, and you can make adjustments. (Same for open world, do not lower rewards because I am grinding an area, I may need a ton of craft mats. If you suspect botting, warn or ban these players, do not punish me for playing the game how I like).

This said, I believe the current system that allows you to get a larger reward for completing each path the first time each day is perfect. But only limit that to the extra 40 tokens earned for that first run. After that, ONLY take those extra tokens away, nothing else. XP, coins, and drops should remain the same. Modify base rewards as necessary for this system to work.

2) Offer a way for casual groups to still take token rewards from not completing a dungeon all the way through. Exploreable dungeons take a LONG time to fully complete and not everyone in the group can stay for an entire run. I saw one developer state that tokens may be added as rare drops. I don’t believe that is the correct solution. That is still only a chance that they will get a reward. Here is my idea:

Have the boss chests drop an item(say a trophy/bosses head, whatever) that the person standing at the door will accept for 5 tokens for that dungeon. However, trading your trophies with him will lock you out of the dungeon for 30 minutes. This way, if someone leaves your group, or you just can’t get past a boss, you still get a reward.

It also works as an “I give up” system which gives a player a moderate-but-not-too-long amount of time to regroup, restrategize and retry the dungeon. OR, it works like an “I won” system, in that you are rewarded for what you’ve done, but keeps you from speed clearing (aka grinding, which was a key selling point of the game). However, it is incredibly important that this time be short, 15-45 minutes at the most. Enough time to stop speed runs, but also not too long to where it prevents the player from playing how and when they like.

Dungeons would also NOT reset automatically. You would be locked to that dungeon instance until you have talked to the npc at the door(what else are they for?) and either traded him your trophies thus locking you out, or if you didn’t get any, maybe an instant reset. Either way, there should not be a way to automatically reset the instance by relogging. Give the door NPC a use.

That’s all I remember at the moment, I will add more as I do. Thanks for reading, apologies for the wall of text. Please discuss what you guys think, I think my ideas are headed in the right direction but I’d like to hear more so that this reward system will one day be perfect.

I agree with a large portion of what you’re suggesting. I’d only prefer they put the tokens back in the chests, and then start a lockout timer for that particular dungeon path upon looting the first chest.

Additionally, those who run through multiple dungeons in succession at a fast pace should definitely not be punished by diminishing returns, as they currently are. Those players are playing the game well, and do not deserve to be interpreted as grinding token farmers by a diminishing return code design. Diminishing returns should be controlled by the combination of daily reward tokens and a lock out system. The dungeon / raid system in World of Warcraft has already established this system, and it’s been proven effective.

By the above design, this would deter people from returning to the same path in the same day. It also makes it impossible to rerun in a grinding mode style because of a lockout feature. There would be only 20 tokens rewarded on a second run due to the daily bonus and also a lockout to prevent another immediate run of the same dungeon path.

Exactly, that’s what I do like about the recent update, the extra tokens for doing each path. That is a step in the right direction. The step back however is not giving people any tokens at all if they can’t beat the whole dungeon. Some people don’t have 4 hours to run with a group of pugs, I should still get my rewards if I now have to find someone else or quit entirely and then get locked out for a bit.

I think a big part of them deciding how to fix this was how dungeon/instances are already handled. I can’t imagine how confusing it is to lock X players to Y instance of Z dungeon for Q amount of time, and then determine if and when this player can play with a new group in a different instance. So leaving and joining instances will have to be hugely rewritten for our ideas to work, but I really believe it needs to be done for dungeons to:

A)Be fun
and
B)Be worth doing

There needs to be a perfect balance of these 2 things if I am required to pay 1200ish tokens for an armor set, then I need a weapon or a Legendary Gift as well.