I’ll preface this by saying I hope we can have a constructive discussion, and any ArenaNet input would be greatly appreciated.
Now a little about myself – I was once just your average player doing some nice open world events, zerging down bosses, going on the daily loot train. Slaying dragons, all that kind of thing. Sure, dungeons were just a little side activity that I did every now and then. It began to change when I first made my mesmer to get in on COF p1 farming; I wanted a legendary and needed to get the $$$ to buy a precursor. As boring as it was, a weird part of me looks back at the old lfgs of “p1 zerk farm, 2h, ping gear!” with a strange nostalgia. Then I began crafting a warrior up, and it was then I began to take the game more seriously (started researching strong builds, that kind of thing, I wasn’t interested in leveling the normal way again).
The dungeon forum and its regulars were basically an endless pool of information. Unsure about something? Ask! I was having trouble with Lupicus so I asked for advice. I wanted people with a similar mindset to play with me so I asked who would be interested. I wanted to learn about how the DPS of classes compared to one another, so I got involved in DPS discussions and asked questions.
Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not the nicest of places. Sure, once you’re in the “circle” it’s fine and you can do what you want and nobody will really fling anything at you, but I can imagine it’s intimidating for someone to ask for help about something and to be told quite bluntly what they would have to do to overcome the challenge, so as opposed to elsewhere in the forum where niceties are more commonplace, and people are more willing to meet at a middle ground. People who interact in the dungeon subforum will generally be polarised between users who swear by berserker gear, myself included, and those who are more inclined to say “play how you want to play”.
Now here is where my issue is, after all of that. The dungeon team was disbanded quite early on and amalgamated in to the living story teams. Now while I personally disagree with this decision, it’s understandable from ArenaNet’s perspective since they would want to push their concept of fortnightly updates to create an ever-changing world and to see how it would compare to the old expansion concept. Dungeons take quite a while to construct too, and the Living Story would be their method of being able to implement new dungeons or improve older ones while giving it an in-lore justification. For example, the Twilight Arbor F/U revamp and the introduction of the molten facility which came along through the Flame & Frost storyline.
The problem however, is that there are a number of issues which people have with the current dungeons. As far as I know, ArenaNet have actually been sent videos of exploits, most notably in Arah and they have yet to do anything about them. If we ignore the whole Fractured! controversy but look purely at the rewards revamp, you get rewarded I believe 1.4g for performing a fractal of level 40 or higher. Now if you compare this to AC which can take a decent group maybe 15 minutes, you get 1.5g, which is more than what the fractal runners who worked their backsides off got for maybe an hour (if in an organised group) or multiple hours, got.
Any opinions in the dungeon forum are completely ignored, dismissed, deleted. If they are insulting or off-topic, then yes, it is correct to delete them, for that is a violation of forum rules, however there are perfectly reasonable threads, not even asking for revamps, but simple fixes which are simply overlooked. The other concern I have is that when things are fixed, they’re never mentioned in patches. You could pretty much glitch Alphard in Arah p2 if you stacked in the middle to never daggerstorm, and recently ArenaNet changed that. Now she’s a more interesting fight admittedly, and it rewards strong, tight play so as opposed to just spamming reflect which is great! But this was never mentioned in the patch notes. A way up to the boat in Arah path 2 was blocked off. This is great, again. However it wasn’t mentioned in patch notes.
So all I can say I’d really want … is just more interaction with the dungeon community. We aren’t expecting new content, a dungeon team doesn’t even exist anymore so it would be a bit excessive unless it was tied to the Living Story itself (in which case it becomes Living Story content), but I think I speak for a number of people when I say I wish there was more interaction between us. How do we feel about certain fights? Are there major issues worth fixing? Is X path too long? Is the reward for path Y appropriate? Minor things like this, it would be nice to be able to interact with staff about. If you feel it’s reasonable to ask for suggestions on what could appear in a new instance … even better, but that’s up to you of course.
Morrï Mahariel | Serah Mahariel | Morrï
A bunch of amateur solos from yours truly