Guild Wars 2

Hawken.7932:

Here I believe (personally) is the source of the problem. The encounters are not badly designed, people are just trying to zerg them, from what I’ve exprienced in all of the bad groups so far, and I would guess often in glass-cannon type builds. You can’t really blame people for this, because there’s not much in the open PvE world which teaches people anything other than “zerg bosses”

that’s what I meant with accessibility, and I mentioned in another post somewhere. there is no real progression, not good explanation or anything. It’s not surprising that if you don’t teach players properly they react accordingly if you slap them in the face without explanation (sure, you can educate yourself, but lets face it, a lot don’t want to, so a certain amount of handholding is needed if you want to engage these players)

a lot comes from the transition into a new system (DD as glass cannons etc, but that’s something you see in tsw which still has the trinity), but I think a lot more people would value and experience the dungeons differently if the changes would have explained better.

Hawken.7932:

So here I don’t really see you explaining why it’s a bad reward system, I see you again saying that you think the dungeons aren’t fun, and I guess that’s because you feel they are too hard.

that’s another thing I mentioned in several other posts (think 1 in the dungeon update thread), they might be considered “hard” but they’re a not difficult. a common complaint even in beta was that moves are badly telegraphed. now I don’t need a DBM popup right in my face (and I think some people are spoiled by it), but a move you can hardly see, worse when the boss is an explosion of particle effects and half his aoe-circles are hidden in geometry that oneshots you is imho bad design. it’s not fun when half the fight is not fighting the actual boss but working around the bugged/bad designed systems. it’s like the game turning your screen blank every minute for 10 seconds – you can still do it, it’s “hard” but hardly challenging or entertaining.

it’s not impossible, I’ve finished plenty of dungeons without many deaths, but it could have been done so much better, which would also affect the accessibility I mentioned above. for example tsw has done a way better job in teaching players and using the same mechanics gw2 uses. they also have less than a handful trash mobs over all instances and in most cases you can even skip them).

as for rewards, I also mentioned that elsewhere. gw1 has almost no bound items, so everything can be traded – this means whatever I do I can progress towards my personal goal. either get money to buy the mats for the armor, get the mats myself, get another item to trade/sell, all with a character I wanted to play in that moment.
It gave people a freedom of choice while still offering progression. now, in gw2 if you don’t do these dungeons for tokens there is no progression towards that armor. ofc you can argue “well then, pic another one” – but that path is equally narrow (and you have to agree that world exploration, events or zerging down dragons isn’t something you do for months, even when arena touts it as endgame", especially when said alternatives get nerfed left and right)

a lot could be alleviated by making the tokens account bound. and letting us transfer tokens between dungeons a certain amount a day so people are not forced to grind the same dungeon over and over.
it’s still quite a step back compared to gw1 (and why I find calling gw2 a revolution is hilarious ironic)
heck, they could’ve emulated gw1 and make the armors require tradeable tokens from the instance, money and a chunk of crafting materials in amounts you can’t get in 1 day (or it would be painfully expensive) and/or gate it with karma, but it’s too late for that now.

Hawken.7932:

I’m not stressing about doing the dungeon again and again and again, I consider it a sideline goal — as there are plenty of other things to do in the game, so bit by bit, I will get those dungeon sets without ever feeling the grind of it.

People wanted and craving to have those dungeon sets “right now” is the real problem, imho.

I’m afraid that’s how they want people to play. “do a bit of this a day, a bit of that, but not too much at once because we don’t want you to progress too fast”.
that might work for you, but not for everybody. people don’t like to get dictated how they are supposed to spend their time unless it fits the developers envisioned path.

as for the “gimme right now”, I don’t think people have a problem with time investment over a long time (see gw1), but that the option to progress are quite limited (I’m sure there are people that just want it nownownow, but I think that’s a minority).

Hawken.7932:

You get the helm, because story mode is just an introduction to the dungeon and the helm is the “free” piece you get for doing it. What do you expect to be rewarded with for story mode?

you only get the helm the first time, it has the same model as every other and I’m pretty sure it doesn’t scale.
also given the current state of story modes that are harder than some of the explorable routes of the dungeon, it’s hardly a worthy reward.

don’t forget you can’t run story modes alone, right now there is 0 incentive to do it twice. good luck finding a group in a month.

Here’s my question I’d love to have the answer to.

It was stated about the one run/one piece before, along with the anti-grind philosophy, and people were fine with it before the game was purchased.

Why was this changed at the last minute, and why was it changed to be the worst grind of any MMO on the market today? What was anyone thinking when 70 runs of a dungeon are needed to get cosmetic gear? The same question applies to the absurd pricing on Cultural Gear, Command Books, and a few other top level items.

If this is around the plan to introduce boosters to lessen the grind in the future to increase cash shop sales you may want to do some study of LOTRO and how this blew up on them big time and why they ended up taking it out of the game. There is no more obvious exploit of customers than this (it is not value, it is exploiting). I hope this was not the case, and I feel ArenaNet is much better than this, but the volume of grind at end game from a company that is supposed to be against the grind is hard to explain why it was made this way to begin with.

@ Wayshuba

With WvW Being extremely unbalanced while the match making shakes out (bolster mechanic anyone?) and the world being so beautifully made, people have taken more of an interest in PvE post 80 that expected.

Irrational measures have been taken to extend what little “endgame” GW2 has to offer. Buff dungeons, Nerf farming (mats and gold) in hopes that there is still some bit of a carrot until new content is released.

Gray.9650:

Hawken.7932:

You get the helm, because story mode is just an introduction to the dungeon and the helm is the “free” piece you get for doing it. What do you expect to be rewarded with for story mode?

you only get the helm the first time, it has the same model as every other and I’m pretty sure it doesn’t scale.
also given the current state of story modes that are harder than some of the explorable routes of the dungeon, it’s hardly a worthy reward.

don’t forget you can’t run story modes alone, right now there is 0 incentive to do it twice. good luck finding a group in a month.

This is the thing with dungeons and the dungeon gear in general — scale, no. What they do is provide you with a rare skin, and you are free to keep that skin and transmute it onto whatever gear you want. This is why the rewards from the low level dungeons are still valid — because once you have the skin, it’s yours.

Anet replies as first comment and says they are working on it and are finding a solution…

Works for me.

/end thread

Evil.9061:

@ Wayshuba

With WvW Being extremely unbalanced while the match making shakes out (bolster mechanic anyone?) and the world being so beautifully made, people have taken more of an interest in PvE post 80 that expected.

Irrational measures have been taken to extend what little “endgame” GW2 has to offer. Buff dungeons, Nerf farming (mats and gold) in hopes that there is still some bit of a carrot until new content is released.

I would buy that if the increases happened AFTER the game launched. But none of the PvP issues existed pre-launch and therefore the decision was made for other reasons than the PvP situation happening now.

So my original questions still stand. Particularly in light of the changes to the dye system (account bound going character bound), I am really curious why so many sudden changes in the “anti-grind” philosophy in the last six months leading up to release.

I agree that dungeons need an overhaul.

I think there can be a very simple solution when it comes to the difficulty and varying skill levels of different people.

bold Introduce new difficulty options to each dungeon*bold*

Or, at least, do so for the explore-mode dungeons.

You can have an “Easy Mode”, “Normal Mode,” “Hard Mode,” and an “Insane” / “Impossible” mode.

The basic idea is that the rewards differ based on the difficulty of the dungeon, with “Easy Mode” yielding lower-level rewards (lets say level 30 armors or weapons), “Normal Mode” yielding between level 40-50 armors or weapons, etc etc.

Now, to not punish anyone for doing easier modes, there -still- should be, while extremely small, a chance for exotic weapons and armor. This “extremely small chance” increases to more and more “achievable” the higher the difficulty.

This will allow people with lower skill, or those with a different strategy of running easier missions faster, they’re own way to play and get a chance at rare things without upsetting the fun of people looking for more of a challenge.

On “Insane” mode, you should force people out of the dungeon if they all wipe. No retries allowed. (This should only be done for the extreme hardest difficulty.) To balance this, you should increase the base rewards and make the chance of an exotic weapon/armor (or some other good reward) much higher, should they actually finish the dungeon.

You should also put time restrictions on the harder runs, so people literally “can’t” grind it. I don’t want to say “Final Fantasy 11” style, because we all get little shivers of disgust when we hear that— but I think it would be better to have less “chances” of finishing the run, the harder the diffculty.

This would require more strategy in the preparation of a group, and not mindless grinding and re-getting up at the waypoint until you eventually win (which is another problem with dungeons.)

It would also bring some excitement and fun to look foward to every day.

Let easy mode be retried as many times as someone wants, and the modes after that be given limited chances. Perhaps you have to wait a few hours for “Normal Mode”, and then you get the idea.

I’d like to see something like this implemented.

Hawken.7932:

Gray.9650:

Hawken.7932:

You get the helm, because story mode is just an introduction to the dungeon and the helm is the “free” piece you get for doing it. What do you expect to be rewarded with for story mode?

you only get the helm the first time, it has the same model as every other and I’m pretty sure it doesn’t scale.
also given the current state of story modes that are harder than some of the explorable routes of the dungeon, it’s hardly a worthy reward.

don’t forget you can’t run story modes alone, right now there is 0 incentive to do it twice. good luck finding a group in a month.

This is the thing with dungeons and the dungeon gear in general — scale, no. What they do is provide you with a rare skin, and you are free to keep that skin and transmute it onto whatever gear you want. This is why the rewards from the low level dungeons are still valid — because once you have the skin, it’s yours.

eh.. it’s a generic model, nothing special. so no one really cares about the model (besides, most people have helmet display disabled).
and even if it would scale so you can use it with the stats for a different build it only drops once. right now there is no incentive to do a story mode twice (there wasn’t really one before the nerf, and even less now)

Nebilim.5127:

Those people are complaining about bosses being impossible is because no strategy was discovered/they don’t know/didn’t specced their classes or pugged every single of their runs.

Believe me, people always find a way. I played Monster Hunter Frontier and no matter how hard Capcom made the bosses, people always discovered some cheap strategy to beat them. Crazy stuff like taking advantage of a specific terrain or monster mechanic, to even calculate the amount of damage it takes to stunlock it.

As example for Guild wars, you can actually make Kholer and the troll to fight each other to death on AC, then you can easily kill the survivor.

Although, I would agree with a 1 piece per run if dungeons were 5 times larger and took hours to complete it. Maybe the sizer of a zone full of dynamic events and what not.

If they’re going to do this, I wish they fix the bug where a player got disconnected, he/she can’t rejoin the party because the dungeon is restarted at that player’s end.

I don’t understand why people are complaining about token cost being too high. The underlying problem is that max-stat armor is WAY too expensive to acquire (perhaps to fit ******* * idea of a good cash store).

If max armor was attainable like it was in GW1 I’m sure NO ONE would have a problem with a token cost of about 8000-1000 tokens for an armor set, and perhaps 3000 for a weapon (1800 for 1h). This token cost is a lot more reasonable seeing as how we have a multum of people already running around in full dungeon armor -.-

I agree with giving bosses more mechanics to make the encounters challenging without being cheap with more damage and stuff.

But I disagree on the rest the system with token and armor that cost a lot is fine and I love it. I’m sure I’m not alone. Not everyone is in this generation that gets all granted without any effort, some enjoy the grind.

grah! don’t say you enjoy the grind, it’s not supposed to be a grind xD
it’s “pacing” XD

I have run all of the story mode dungeons – where i received absolutely no upgrades for anything i had. because all exotic armor is equivalent. I have crafted my own Exotic armor and weapons and have no need for anything else. I’m happy with looks of the crafted armor.
And I get better loot outside of dungeons doing events – I usually receive blues in dungeons. And greens and some yellows for doing events.
Every chest opening is a huge disappointment.
Every single dungeon story mode reward is the same stupid hat.

If i want to change my stat set I can craft another set to accommodate this.

The legendary is absolutely ridiculous to get for a minimal increase.
I have already obtained the WvWvW Ingredient for 500 Badges of honor. And I am bored with WvWvW now.
So basically all i need now is a crap ton of dungeon runs through the same pointless dungeon over and over. And a ton of karma and gold. Im probably not going to finish it before getting bored to death.
I am actually finding it hard to have a reason to play GW2 anymore.

I haven’t finished the world exploration yet. I’m at 73% so I will finish the maps and the hearts and general exploration and events then most likely I am done.

there needs to be some reason to continue to play other than appearance items.

@Tattered

Should have done some research before buying the game.
They have always said you wouldn’t have to grind for stats, only looks.

MassDelusion.9130:

@Tattered

Should have done some research before buying the game.
They have always said you wouldn’t have to grind for stats, only looks.

True, I just think the reality of an MMO with actually no endgame has just sank in for a lot of people.

The results are peak time popluations, dungeon participation and guilds shrinking by the day.

It’s a shame, its such a beautiful game.

Another suggestion to Arenanet:

could you please have exclusive crafting recipes and pets with a small chance of dropping from mobs or bosses in dungeons, it gives people something to hope for everytime they run the dungeon other that just that 1 token which is a known reward and consequently not surprising. You need the element that “you may get something extra that you can’t get anywhere else” when running these things over and over…

also it would do your economy well if they weren’t bind on pickup, so you could sell them on the Trading Post… it’s hard-to-get items like these that give players with alot of money something to purchase… and give other players who run dungeons something to strive for so they don’t become irrelevant after they get the recipe/pet for themselves…

WoW has this feature and its PvE has been successful due to this surprise element (among others obviously). Also the boss-fights in WoW are among the best I’ve seen in any MMO and very much worth looking at for inspiration – they essentially hold the standard for raid bosses in my opinion…

Edit: Special mats needed to craft top items is another one that would add value to running dungeons over and over… And rewards that have a “chance” of showing up are always better than guaranteed rewards because the incentive for them is stronger – people love to be pleasantly surprised! And you won’t flood the economy…

Robert Hrouda.1327:

we’re very aware that our reward system is not up to par for dungeons. It is something we are actively working on right now, to try and find a solution for. I’m not going to talk about what our plans are because I don’t want us to be trapped in promises, but I will say this: We know, and are actively working on updating the system.

Thumbs up !!!

I realy like the Dynamic encounters and it feels rewarding that you finally downed a (in the begin looking impossible) boss.
Only the loot is/was a major setback

Suggestion, small chance ( 0.5% without magic find) for extremely cool looking exotics
And a bigger chance (maybe 1 till 5 % without magic find) for a random 75-80 normal exotic.

anyhow, Keep up the good work

I want 2 Nightmare Swords and 1 Nightmare Greatsword. That’s over 900 tokens. Finding a PUG group capable of doing TA explorable has proved impossible while its a bit of a selfish request to keep asking my guild. Ill have to run it over 25 times…

Ugh…

thank you for the update robert

+1 This topic is more relevant now than it ever was before.

I’m not condoning the OP’s original suggestions just that the dungeons and probably their rewards need some work.

holy ressurrection!!

It’s a pitty that the changes they did on TA wasn’t what the community really wanted. Instead of helping a path that had a bug that could be fixed, we ended with a abandoned path, with unskippable cutscenes and random drops. There are a few good ideas to it, but the downside of the new path wages more against them.

Robert has been fired from no longer works for ArenaNet.

In other news, giant red text of PvP developer livestream soon. Joy. Im sure the 1% will love it.