Guild Wars 2

Background:

• Anet says, “Hard mode is bad because it fractures the community.”
• Players say, “Add filters to lfg.”

The calls for filters demonstrate that the dungeon community is already fractured. But this shouldn’t be a surprise: different people want to play dungeons in different ways, and it’s stupid to prioritize being able to find people to play with as highly as Colin does in that answer. What’s important isn’t being able to find people to play with; it’s being able to find like-minded people to play with. That’s what filters facilitate. Filters embrace and cater to the divisions in the community. And if Anet are willing to add them, then their objection to hard mode dissolves.

I could even imagine hard mode helping with the existing issues, as long as the rewards aren’t horrid, by giving the people who currently do meta dungeon runs something else to do, so that they aren’t even trying to pug normal explorable dungeons. (I’m imagining something like the GW1 hard mode requirements—maybe dungeon master for dungeons, and fotm might not even need hard mode as long as we get higher levels at some point—but of course the implementation is a separate issue.)

I realize hard mode is probably more of a pipe dream than filters, but in principle, at least, if one of them is on Anet’s radar, I think the other should be, too.

I agree,

There’s already a “hard mode” in the form of instabilities, so it would be easy to implement into current dungeons. They could simply add an NPC at the start of the path asking what sort of challenge the players wanted: perma-cripple, no energy, random shocks of lighting, whatever.

Just be sure to reward those who can actually these modes, whether with extra tokens or gold.

My 0.02

I think a cheap way of doing hard mode is to just limit the amount of people in a dungeon. If you solo,2man,3man a dungeon it is essentially hard mode and all Anet need to do is to design a reward system that give people reason to do that.

EcoRI.9273:

I think a cheap way of doing hard mode is to just limit the amount of people in a dungeon. If you solo,2man,3man a dungeon it is essentially hard mode and all Anet need to do is to design a reward system that give people reason to do that.

Personally I’d rather see “gambits” of sorts than simply low manning. Low manning is fun in it’s own right but there are also dungeons you simply can’t do without people. Give me half endurance regen rate, Double damage intake, Half damage output, stuff like that. I always thought gambits in CP were a great idea that should be easily implemented elsewhere. (easy of course being ideally, who knows how it’s coded and whether it’s truly possible within that sense).

I really look forward of gambits on lvl 50, so i can feel even more angry when i get nothing upon completing it.

A dungeon hard mode would be great.
Giving players more opportunities to work on their skill and creating new challenges that way.

I think leaderboards would be cool too. Updated every week.
E.g running a dungeon with undermanned teams will record both time and damage dealt in total.
At the end of the run, a number is given, placed on the leaderboard. But you can only try it once a day.
At the end of the day the numbers for completing the dungeon will be shown in the leaderboard and compared with numbers accomplished by other parties.

The best parties will get rewards or new titles.

Just my opinion.