Effort, Risk, and Reward in Dungeons

Effort, Risk, and Reward in Dungeons

in Fractals, Dungeons & Raids

Posted by: ecthelion.6794

ecthelion.6794

Dungeons are as classic as RPGs can get. What makes a repeatable, “enjoyable” dungeon is the proper balance of 3 factors:

1. Effort: how much time and mental agony is spent to accomplish the dungeon by the AVERAGE player

2. Risk: the possibility of death, and the costs that come with it

3. Reward: both guaranteed (tokens) and chance based (chest rewards)

Right now the problem that Dungeons in GW2 suffers heavily from is a imbalance where:

Effort > Reward

Risk > Reward

Effort + Risk >>> Reward

Many, if not most players come out of a dungeon with LESS money they when they entered it. Cost of repairs is not recuperated by the chest rewards. This simply cannot stand, it’s just bad, full stop.

A Dungeon takes usually 2 hours to complete for most players, PUGs etc. This amount of time just wandering world, not deliberately farming per se as a level 80 player is easily 50 silver. In a Dungeon it can be -10 or more. And this is ASSUMING you finish. If one player drops (which happens a lot in PUGs), all your efforts and silvers on repairs are for naught.

And this is not even factoring the EFFORT, which is the 2 hours of your life doing something quite repetitive. And with the bugs and poorly designed areas of Dungeons, the frustration is also quite severe.

If the player does not wish to get the Dungeon specific armor, the tokens are quite useless. And there are many nice Dungeons with TERRIBLE looking armors (Arah, Twilight Arbor, Crucible of Eternity, Sorrows, basically most of them).

From a purely logical perspective, there is NO practical reason for any standard MMO player who is motivated mainly by reward for his time and effort and frustrations to op to do a Dungeon.

How to fix this?

1. Anvil repairs should be either free or come at a 1/2 price
2. Better chest rewards, at least ONE Rare should be guaranteed per chest, and significant chance for an Exotic at the last chest
3. Some kind of feature to automatically “downgrade” enemy strength when players LEAVE a dungeon early.

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Posted by: Dead.7385

Dead.7385

2. Better chest rewards, at least ONE Rare should be guaranteed per chest, and significant chance for an Exotic at the last chest

+1, One yellow/One green – Low chance to get an exotic on last chest is exactly what needs to be done to boost reward a bit.

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Posted by: Aphix.9846

Aphix.9846

Yep.
Aways thought this was a no-brainer. Rewards for completing dungeons, but I guess Anet lives in a different world or something…

I actually do not understand why do I only get 3 blues per chest and pretty much nothing else for the whole dungeon. Nothing. It does not make sense.

Anyone who’s planning on saying something like this: ‘go back to panda land and go collect ur epic rewards there ! GW2 is to have fun !’
..well, please don’t, that’s just silly.

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Posted by: Disconnected.9253

Disconnected.9253

this is especially true for story modes where you don’t even get tokens. There is 0 reason to run them except as ‘attunement’ for EM.

They should also have the chests drop an occasional bag of crafting mats imo.

also, i’m really quite tired of the mob ‘loot bags’ dropping only coin… 4c to be exact.
I mean… really, 4c from a lvl 70+ mob? Are you mocking me?

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Posted by: ecthelion.6794

ecthelion.6794

Currently, there is neither material motivation or ease of play for even starting a Dungeon.

Let’s work through the usual Dungeon experience for the average player:

1. Queues about 20-30 min to get a full team together for the run
2. Slogs through the Dungeon, gets wiped a few times, anvil, anvil, anvil, down by 6+ silver on repairs, 2 hours in… MAYBE finishes assuming no one has dropped and they’re not doing a Dungeon that is bugged or has an impossible boss (Arah).
3. Completion, about… 10+ blues, 2-4 greens, maybe 1 yellow if they’re lucky. Some tokens too… but the Dungeon armor has low appeal for most players since most of the sets are pretty ugly.

Done, and most players never go back, no motivation, no reward.
I think the main reason why there are still people doing them in substantial number is that there’s pretty much no other viable alternatives on the PvE side.

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Posted by: Manasa Devi.7958

Manasa Devi.7958

I just posted a lengthy diatribe in another topic that would’ve been right at home here.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/GW2-Dungeons-need-re-balancing-imo/page/2#post340740

My conclusion in a single, short sentence: Dungeons aren’t worth the bother. Pretty much what the OP conveyed here.

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Posted by: Dabu.1258

Dabu.1258

The best way to enjoy Dungeons is easy…
MAKE A QUEUE INTERFACE to play with ALL servers

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Posted by: ZtriDer.9573

ZtriDer.9573

The only way to play dungeons today is with guildmembers. Trying to play it with a PuG is timesink, painfull, unrewording and probably ruining the experiance because some random guy desides to ragequit the run and you will not be able to get an replacement.

Lost where no man has been lost before!

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Posted by: Dess.4391

Dess.4391

how much time and mental agony is spent to accomplish the dungeon by the AVERAGE player? Really, if they are an agony why you go?? A game only function its for you to have fun! Why do the if you dont like them??
And lets say the rewards are low…. to open a chest and see all blue crap its not a lot of fun, but tbh i got the dungeon wep i wanted in a dungeon a lot faster than in others RPG (and no, not WoW, i never played it and never will). In last game i played it took me over 1 year to complete my armor set and 6 months to get the wep i wanted. Here i did AC 2 days and i allready got my wep thx to token system. So are rewards that low??
Ohh and pug runs can be great with some ppl and will be terrible with others, its a risk, sure, but it can turn awesome.

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Posted by: yandere.9176

yandere.9176

For me the main problem is that the dungeon in it self are not rewarding. You kill the last boss, and you think “That’s it”?

A huge turn off for me are that they are anvils in the dungeon and you can rally on waypoints.

When I did a raid and even some of the harder quests in DDO I got through there without death, because of methodical exploration and a team that coullearn through the game what it ment to play together. And if we got wiped by t last boss and our efferts were for nothing, well, this wasn’t really so bad, because we fought our way to the boss.

The idea that you can rally every time you want and that a stratagy to beat some encounters is to run in die, rally and run in again, kills every sense of acomplishment you could have had. I new I was so happy when I finished the dragon raid in DDO for the first time. We toke screenshots, we jumped around like crazy, we got poor loot but that wasn’t the problem it was done and you got the feeling it could be done again that’s what mattered.

The first dungeon I got though was just… Never again. I died so many times. I didn’t really got an idea how to get though this dungeon witout a single death and there were no puzzles nothing to think about it was just "Kill the next mob and the next and the… "

I had no desire to run these things again, and no reward could bring me to this.

Before you say I should go back to DDO. Well no, this game is much better, but DDO has better dungeon design. But this game is pretty backwards anyway, about usual MMO interests. I don’t like PvP and I enjoy the PvP in this game, I am the typical raider and I am really not interested in the dungeons.

Desolation – Mistress of significance level

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Posted by: Kruunch.3714

Kruunch.3714

I agree 100% with the OP.

The risk vs. reward ratio is completely out of whack with current dungeon design.

Kind of odd considering that the open world content is similar but going the opposite direction (more reward for less risk).

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Posted by: Cisza.9540

Cisza.9540

I will write it again, as I did in many other posts:

Explorable dungeons are NOT meant to be done by random players (read: pugs). That’s the official statement. That’s how the game is designed.

If you’re complaining that you cannot finish dungeon in pug group – you may aswell complain that you cannot hit 90 level.

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Posted by: aleiro.8521

aleiro.8521

Dungeons are as classic as RPGs can get. What makes a repeatable, “enjoyable” dungeon is the proper balance of 3 factors:

1. Effort: how much time and mental agony is spent to accomplish the dungeon by the AVERAGE player

2. Risk: the possibility of death, and the costs that come with it

3. Reward: both guaranteed (tokens) and chance based (chest rewards)

Right now the problem that Dungeons in GW2 suffers heavily from is a imbalance where:

Effort > Reward

Risk > Reward

Effort + Risk >>> Reward

Many, if not most players come out of a dungeon with LESS money they when they entered it. Cost of repairs is not recuperated by the chest rewards. This simply cannot stand, it’s just bad, full stop.

A Dungeon takes usually 2 hours to complete for most players, PUGs etc. This amount of time just wandering world, not deliberately farming per se as a level 80 player is easily 50 silver. In a Dungeon it can be -10 or more. And this is ASSUMING you finish. If one player drops (which happens a lot in PUGs), all your efforts and silvers on repairs are for naught.

And this is not even factoring the EFFORT, which is the 2 hours of your life doing something quite repetitive. And with the bugs and poorly designed areas of Dungeons, the frustration is also quite severe.

If the player does not wish to get the Dungeon specific armor, the tokens are quite useless. And there are many nice Dungeons with TERRIBLE looking armors (Arah, Twilight Arbor, Crucible of Eternity, Sorrows, basically most of them).

From a purely logical perspective, there is NO practical reason for any standard MMO player who is motivated mainly by reward for his time and effort and frustrations to op to do a Dungeon.

How to fix this?

1. Anvil repairs should be either free or come at a 1/2 price
2. Better chest rewards, at least ONE Rare should be guaranteed per chest, and significant chance for an Exotic at the last chest
3. Some kind of feature to automatically “downgrade” enemy strength when players LEAVE a dungeon early.

No way, this post says die as much as you want and complete the dungeon = extremely good rewards. Don’t die and complete the dungeon = same rewards.

No just no, you wanna have your cake and eat it too….and no freakin way that is enjoyable.

Get better at the dungeons and you will start profitting from them, change your build, learn the mechanics, experiment. In other words have fun…otherwise go to the sticky for dungeon videos and watch others do the dungeon and repeat what they do but under no circumstances should they improve rewards. They just did, you get tons of tokens and rares in chests now.
A-net nerfed the dungeons and now there is a million more posts asking for more nerfs…it’s time to stop
You want easy bosses? go do dynamic events please.

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Posted by: Manasa Devi.7958

Manasa Devi.7958

I will write it again, as I did in many other posts:

Explorable dungeons are NOT meant to be done by random players (read: pugs). That’s the official statement. That’s how the game is designed.

Sure, but that leaves the game with a glaring problem: it has no “on-demand” content for casual, unorganized play.

There’s DEs, but they’re unreliable. It’s pretty much a roll of the dice whether or not you’ll be able to do the more interesting ones during a given play session, unless you play for hours and hours on end. Want to experience killing a dragon? They’re on what, 3 hour timers? Good luck if you just have 1.5 hours. Want to do a temple liberation event in Orr? Too bad, that temple you’ve never done before is already under pact control. Again. Just like yesterday and the day before.

The game really needs some stuff that you can reliably do whenever you want it, and the only reasonable way to have that, is if it’s in instances. If the only instances are dungeons that demand more of most players than they’re willing to invest, that leaves the game barren for those players.

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Posted by: ecthelion.6794

ecthelion.6794

Alright, since it seems there are a lot of "super 1337’ players here who always have the luxury of playing with a guild and have officially designated Dungeons as a “no PUG zone”…

That’s just reducing the RISK aspect of the Dungeon. OK, so you’ve lowered the RISK to near zero, cause you will not die.

Fine.

But that still does NOT answer the problem of:

Effort > Reward

At least an hour of time (and this is a VERY optimistic assumption), plus the nature of repetition, and trust me, if your team is that good, this is probably not their first time, will not exactly be making the Dungeon run more fun.

Here’s the bottom line:

No matter how you run the Dungeon, short of an exploit, you will just not get more of the Dungeon than you spent to get through the Dungeon in terms of time, effort, agony, and repair cost, and maybe even consumables.

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Posted by: Alur.7510

Alur.7510

I must agree dungeons need better rewards, and he has reason, doesn’t pay off 3H in Arah, for 60 tokens and 26s, where I have to fight 6-7 bosses, and after 3h I get 3 blues and 26s + 60 tokens… em.. no thanks, and btw we don’t die much.
It’s quite bad reward wise.

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Posted by: Riaky.8965

Riaky.8965

Risk and reward in this game isn’t balance. It takes you 1-2 hours on some of the Arah dungeon path with countless death and it gives you practically the same rewards as you do some dungeon in like 20 mins with no death