Guild Wars 2

When designing a system with known, fixed rewards that must be accumulated over time, the hardest part is making players take the first step; the following ones are easier, as the tendency to continue accumulating the rewards go on.

Using the GW2 dungeons as an example: doing a single path gives more or less 60 tokens. That’s a fixed reward which, by itself, is not enough to buy anything useful. But, once a player has actually done a path and found himself with 60 tokens he has nothing to use for, said player has a strong incentive to do said dungeon again until he has enough tokens to buy something.

The issue, then, is how to make the player take that first step – do a single dungeon path. Between the lack of a good in-game LFG tool, how time consuming a dungeon may be with a bad group, and the need to watch YouTube videos to be aware of all popular exploits in a given path, there is a significant entry barrier that should not exist.

I believe this could be fixed by implementing three changes:

• Making the first path of every dungeon to give little gold, so the reason to do it would be to get dungeon tokens, nothing else.

• Making the first path of every dungeon to be easy enough so an average PUG could play through it in a reasonable time without having to rely on exploits (and exploits would have to be removed from at least this path).

• Making the second and third paths of every dungeon significantly harder, tailored for organized groups.

We would then have a hook to make players try dungeons and so begin collecting tokens, which would trigger the impulse to keep playing until one gets enough tokens to buy something. The “easy” path would also serve as an introduction to the dungeon, teaching players about its main mechanics and about its layout. At the same time, we would reward skilled players and organized groups by allowing them to collect dungeon rewards in one third of the time it would take less skilled players, which would also be an incentive for players who only do the “easy” path to try to become better players so they can get their tokens more quickly.

I disagree with having one easy path to dungeons… For instance CoE… all 3 paths are hard"ish".

I don’t want there to be a breeze through part where anyone can run in and eventually get enough tokens to have the same armor set that I had to kill myself for.

There needs to be a certain level of difficulty so that my awesome armor set will give me the mindset that I accomplished something.

Lodius.5392:

I disagree with having one easy path to dungeons… For instance CoE… all 3 paths are hard"ish".

I don’t want there to be a breeze through part where anyone can run in and eventually get enough tokens to have the same armor set that I had to kill myself for.

There needs to be a certain level of difficulty so that my awesome armor set will give me the mindset that I accomplished something.

To you possibly, but once you know the attacks it’s one of the easiest dungeons available atm. This can also depend on the quality of your team, if you are jumping in ragtag pugs who are using magic find and other poor stat setups then you’re gonna have a bad time of it. Coe can be a breeze through run though, much like Cof. In fact most of the dungeons are, no one really admires someone in a coe set, or an arah set.. or any of the dungeon sets as none of them were hard to get. It is true some dungeons take longer than others, but the difficulty doesn’t vary too much.

I feel there should be a hard mode path added to each dungeon with a separate set of skin Armour that can only be achieved by completing the hard mode x amount of times. We already have easy mode with the current dungeons.

swiftpaw.6397:

I feel there should be a hard mode path added to each dungeon with a separate set of skin.

Same dungeon weapons with different colours would suffice. It doesn’t really matter what skin or if the skins looks good, as long as it actually means something.

Yeah, but at the moment all they have is 3 easy paths. 4 in the case of Arah.

There really isn’t much incentive to do the hard paths. CoF is actually a good example of this. On rare occasions you may have people doing path 2 but almost never doing path 3. Everyone just wants to run path 1. So the game already has in place this system that you are talking about and you can see how “well” that’s working. Although you didn’t mention this explicitly, it’s unlikely that giving slightly better rewards would work unless they were significantly better. People would evaluate the risk/reward first before setting foot in the hard paths.

COE is actually a good example of a dungeon where all three paths are even in difficulty. Another is CM although you could say the last boss of path 3 is a little tougher than last bosses of the other 2 paths.

zeromius.1604:

There really isn’t much incentive to do the hard paths. CoF is actually a good example of this. On rare occasions you may have people doing path 2 but almost never doing path 3. Everyone just wants to run path 1.

But not because of the tokens, rather to get gold. Doing the same path over and over to get tokens isn’t nearly as efficient due to the way scalling works; it could even scale further so after the third run there are zero tokens awarded.

As part of my idea, all dungeons would give less gold, including CoF1, so people would do them to get tokens, not to farm gold.

Erasculio.2914:

zeromius.1604:

There really isn’t much incentive to do the hard paths. CoF is actually a good example of this. On rare occasions you may have people doing path 2 but almost never doing path 3. Everyone just wants to run path 1.

But not because of the tokens, rather to get gold. Doing the same path over and over to get tokens isn’t nearly as efficient due to the way scalling works; it could even scale further so after the third run there are zero tokens awarded.

As part of my idea, all dungeons would give less gold, including CoF1, so people would do them to get tokens, not to farm gold.

But my point is that you would still have people that run CoF path 1 exclusively regardless of rewards. If your solution is implemented then the problem gets propagated to all other dungeons. People would run the easiest path only of any dungeon if there is a disparity in the difficulty. Ironically enough your plan to get more people to experience dungeons will actually have the opposite effect when you look at the bigger picture. CoF is the best of example of what not to do going forward.

zeromius.1604:

People would run the easiest path only of any dungeon if there is a disparity in the difficulty. Ironically enough your plan to get more people to experience dungeons will actually have the opposite effect when you look at the bigger picture.

Actually, if people did the easy path of all dungeons, it would likely be more people playing more varied dungeons than we have today (in which most people play just Cof1). Besides, running the easy path multiple times in a single day would be useless; people would be forced either to wait until the next day, or get better and do the hard paths.

I see nothing wrong with this idea at all. In fact, by having an easier path (or full on easier modes for all paths) it would actually allow for having an extra hard path (or modes for all paths) as well. Getting players started on actually running the dungeons is certainly the hardest part. Also, quite frankly, even if they never did anything more than the easy paths it would still make the dungeons more worthwhile for ANet to spend time/money creating.

My only only concern is hard != long. When your party isnt good enough you should know right away. A lot of players are on a time constraints. Its why fewer players run arah p4; yes i know it can be done in 30 mins now.

Good idea! Having a easy (shorter?), less rewarding path allow some players (the casual ones, or the ones without party) to know the dungeon experience.

And yes, it will allow to have a harder (or longer, as you wish), more rewarding path, to the hardcore gamers.

All players have different levels of skills, dedication, of time to play. Let have different game experiences to them, so that all enjoy the game.

Of course, people that play less or have less skills should not get the same reward as those more dedicated players. The easy paths should give less money, less tokens, less powerful items, or even armors of weapons with simpler looks or slightly lesser stats.