Guild Wars 2

I will give the Anet design team props for wanting to act quickly, but after yesterdays 25-Sep dungeon update, it’s clear you still don’t understand why the majority opinion of your player pop is that “dungeon rewards aren’t worth it” and that’s why your first attempt at a fix is failing to be met with cries of “yay! thanks!”.

TLDR Summary (expanded on further below)

1. Your internal analytics and heat maps won’t identify the true problem if you don’t ask the right questions. Clearly, you are asking the wrong questions.

2. Your primary issue with the current reward design and the previous reward design is that there is currently no alternative path for your majority segment of casual players to attain legendary weapons and 8 of your prestige gear skin sets. Currently, there is only one path to attain these PvE endgame “player investment” goals, and this path requires performing social engineering to create/join a static hardcore group. Such social engineering requires long sessions of in-game availability (which is literally impossible for most casual players) and/or turning your back on friends/family or your casual “fun” guild mates (which is highly unpalatable for most casual players).

3. If you refuse to provide an alternate path for your majority segment of casual players with no ability or desire to socially engineer themselves into static hardcore groups, then you must somehow make at least a portion of your dungeon content meet two important criteria: A) It must be “dumbed down” to be more easily learned and successfully completed by a non-static and non-hardcore group, and B) It must reward dungeon tokens, although it’s perfectly acceptable to reward such tokens at a slower rate than the hardcore static groups can acquire them.

4. Finally, even for the hardcore static groups, and certainly for the non-hardcore, non-static groups, you must either eliminate or significantly reduce the cost of armor repairs, so that every player of every stripe feels like they at least earn decent money for the headache of trying to learn or clear your dungeon content. Some players aren’t in it for the tokens (and ultimately the prestige armor and legendary weapons), but actually do it “just for fun”. But it’s not “fun” at all if you walk away from 30-120 minutes of exceedingly tough challenge with less cash than you started with, or with a negligible net gain of cash for the time invested.

(continued in next post)

Expanded Detail on each Point in the TLDR Summary

Regarding point #1

Your primary revenue stream isn’t box sales: that portion of your total revenue simply recouped cost of development (and kudos to pulling that off successfully—raise a beer to poor Funcom while you thank your lucky stars). Your primary revenue stream isn’t PvP either: SPvP is essentially free to play, and WubWub “strength” is determined by PvE grinding in one form or another. So your primary revenue stream is getting players invested enough in PvE grinding of one form or another such that they feel compelled to spend money on extra bank slots, extra character inventory bag slots and to buy gems to exchange for gold currency. And your primary reason to become invested thus is chasing after “prestige” and “legendary” skins of various sorts.

So the primary question you should should be asking of your analytics is this: “How many players are trying to become invested but are failing to do so?”

My strong hunch is that if you ask the right questions to spell out the answer to this important meta-question, you’ll discover that your current end-game systems to incentivize players to become invested are currently rewarding (and therefore encouraging investement) only that small percentage of your total player pop that can afford to spend 3+ hours of contiguous play time in any given session, and that typically spend 6+ hours of playtime per day logged in to GW2.

Now, what questions should you be asking of your analytics to spell out the answer to this meta-question? Here’s a few obvious ones to get you started on the right path:

A. How long does it currently take, on average, for a group trying to complete a new explorable path (in a dungeon) that they’ve never tried before, to successfully complete that path? Call this metric “Learning time to completion”.

B. What percentage of our total player pop logs in regularly for play session lengths that equal or exceed the “average learning time to completion”. Call this metric your “able-to-learn population”, and call the converse metric your “cannot-learn population”.

C. What percentage of your “cannot-learn population” has attempted only 4 or fewer story mode dungeons and never even attempted an explorable path? Call this metric your “easily intimidated population”.

D. What percentage of your “cannot-learn population” has attempted no more than 4 total explorable paths? Call this metric your “brick-walled population”.

E. What is percentage of your total player population comprises the set of “easily intimidated population” PLUS “brick-walled population”? Call this metric your “lost sales opportunity”. Because that’s exactly what this sum tells you: how much of your population wants to be heavily invested in working towards your PvE endgame grinding rewards, but is literally unable to become invested because of your current dungeon design.

Now, you can of course refine these sample metrics further, but the basic pattern I’ve laid out with these 5 questions and sample metrics will get you pretty close to an accurate metric for your true “lost sales opportunity” with regard to ongoing cash shop revenue.

(continued in next post)

Regarding points #2 – 4

You can offer your “lost sales opportunity population” a reason to become invested in only three possible ways:

A. Change the cost/recipe requirements to obtain the 8 prestige gear sets (for dungeons) to accept an alternate currency other than dungeon tokens. In the case of legendary weapon crafting, this means some alternative ingredient in the recipe other than “gifts” that require dungeon tokens to craft. In the case of prestige dungeon gear, this means accepting some other currency entirely. Karma? Gold? Something new that isn’t yet in the game?

B. Provide an entirely alternate path to obtaining dungeon tokens. This enables you to keep the current prestige dungeon vendor costs and legendary recipe costs the same. But now you have to find some other way to put dungeon tokens in the hands of the “lost sales opportunity population” that does not require them to run the dungeon paths that they clearly cannot run for one reason or another. Yes, absolutely provide such alternative tokens at a slower rate than you would get by doing the dungeon paths! No one will complain at taking longer to achieve an end-game goal than a “hardcore” or “elite” player. People complain only when they are entirely blocked from being able to achieve an end-game goal despite having “skill”.

C. Dumb-down your dungeons so that at least one path (out of four total in each dungeon) is: A) doable at a 70% success rate within 60 minutes AT MOST by your “lost sales opportunity population”, and B) provides dungeon tokens, albeit at a slower rate than the other paths that are intended only for the hardcore/elite players.

And let’s make something crystal clear about sub-points B and C above. Everyone throws out terms like hardcore, elite, and casual as if hardcore/elite = player skill, and that casual = bad players with no skill. This is completely, utterly wrong. Many—most—casual players have skill in spades. What they don’t have, however, is the time or desire to do the social engineering necessary to somehow get themselves into a static dungeon group of 5 skilled players. Casual players are usually either time-gated-per-play session and can game at most in contiguous blocks of 30-90 minutes, or else they are highly motivated by “social” gameplay with friends/family or small “fun” guilds rather than large “hardcore” guilds.

In the former “time-gated” case, they literally don’t have the time in any one play session to sit around organizing a PUG of 5 players who already know the dungeon path well and have the requisite builds/levels, etc. There’s a lot of chat-based “vetting” that’s involved in setting up such PUGs for extremely challenging content, and this vetting takes a lot of TIME on top of the time required to then actually perform the run.

In the latter “highly motivated by social gameplay considerations”, a casual player might have the time in at least some play sessions to perform such vetting for a PUG, but they are strongly averse to doing so because the primary motivator for them doing any group PvE activity at all is to play with friends/family/spouses, or else with guildmates they might have known for years in a small, “casual” multi-gaming guild.

I don’t like your solution as it alienates the 1%. There should always be an elite crew who are capable of obtaining unique gear that ‘casuals’ can’t get their hands on. These people set a bar for casuals to try to work towards and become better. You need to remember, we’re no longer in the age where this game style is new. The challenge needs to exist in this game and the rewards should compensate achievement.

I agree that there should be something for casual players to go after and there there should be reasonable goals for casual gamers as they will be the what brings home the bacon for Anet. However, there still needs to be an end game with a bar set above that for the casual.

Currently some of the attainable achievement goals will always be out of reach for the casual gamer. I advise grouping some of these up into lesser groups. Maybe a certificate program for level of achievements based on difficulty. For example, the griffonrock achievement should be put into a higher level than most of the puzzles you go after.

Currently, there’s very little, if any reward for casual gamers to engage in repetitive game play. And people who do do this are penalized which is going to hurt their wallet in the end as you’ve stated.

An easier solution would be that the current gear reward does something unique where a lower, less ‘elaborate’ set would be achievable for those who won’t be that 1%.

Good points….

I agree with the varying difficulties in the dungeon paths; it can be a real steep learning curve for folks not familiar to the whole MMO-scene. They should all be tuned to take 30-45 minutes or so…. but it might take a little more time at first to learn it. The easier paths have less reward, but are more forgiving in terms of less one-shotting; their design should be getting players introduced to the typical boss/mob mechanics in this dungeon and some of the tactics that will need to be employed in order to pull off a successful section run. The other paths ramp up in difficulty and reward (with the one path that’s super hard), but are more punishing because they demand better coordination/cooperation and execution. It would also help if there was some indication of path difficult when choosing one… kinda like when you choose a pit challenge in some quests.

I think this helps alleviate some of the repair costs because it gives players a better idea of what they’re getting themselves into. Easy path won’t be too punishing so I’ll likely come out of this with some more coin in my pocket. Medium path is gonna be a little riskier, but some better opportunities for rewards. Hard path is gonna be dicey, so I really need to know what I’m doing otherwise I’m just gonna have a nice repair bill waiting for me. Insanity path (assuming 4 paths to a dungeon) is just dumb to attempt unless I’m a baller.

Zagdul.1502:

I don’t like your solution as it alienates the 1%. There should always be an elite crew who are capable of obtaining unique gear that ‘casuals’ can’t get their hands on. These people set a bar for casuals to try to work towards and become better. You need to remember, we’re no longer in the age where this game style is new. The challenge needs to exist in this game and the rewards should compensate achievement.

…

Currently, there’s very little, if any reward for casual gamers to engage in repetitive game play. And people who do do this are penalized which is going to hurt their wallet in the end as you’ve stated.

An easier solution would be that the current gear reward does something unique where a lower, less ‘elaborate’ set would be achievable for those who won’t be that 1%.

Your argument falls into the faulty line of reasoning that “elite” equals skill, and “casual” equals no skill (or less skill). I clearly address this faulty assumption in the third post.

No casual player, most of whom have PLENTY of skill, will complain about a system whereby elite players with lots of contiguous playtime to throw at the game will achieve the prestige rewards much faster. Casuals start complaining only when they are completely blocked from attaining rewards that they have the skill to attain.

And should Anet really cater to only 1% of their playerbase and exclude the other 99% from having a reason to stay invested and spending money? Seriously?

Honestly I think your problem would be solved by them keeping the diminishing returns (to stop “exploiters”) but have it working such that the dungeon tokens drop per boss.

If done this way, the casual players have enough time to kill a few bosses to gain tokens. This would allow those casuals with enough skill to still eventually gain the dungeon skins; just at a much slower rate than those with the time to complete one or more paths per gaming session.

With the current system, if casual players do not have enough time to finish a full run they get 0 tokens. This time required can be reduced over time as they gain experience with the dungeon (as you noted), but the amount of time taken to reduce the overall is extended by quite a bit as casuals only have so much time per session to learn the parts of the dungeon, so they may only get so far each time until they have optimized their times in the parts the initially have time for … and this is assuming they don’t get aggravated with the lack of any real rewards and find something else to do … running a dungeon five times and killing 50, 60, 70, 80, 90% of the bosses and getting no rewards whatsoever out of those 5 different gaming sessions can be demoralizing and/or infuriating (depending on the person).

Also, to agree with the OP, casual does not indicate a lack of skill. Casual indicate’s a restriction of free-time to play. Some of us, often those with more money to pour into the game, work full-time jobs.

Neither group is “better” or “worse”, but it would be nice to have options. For those casuals with time restrictions on their selves and those they play with that prevent them from having 5 people long enough for full dungeon runs, the options for exotics are to farm gold to buy them on the AH, farm Karma to buy from merchants, or farm PvP Tokens to buy from merchants (though tokens only get you exotic weapons … not exotic armor).

Everyone is capable of getting everything in this game as long as they are willing to spend the time on it. If you’re not willing to spend the time to achieve things, such as legendary weapons, then you don’t deserve them. It doesn’t matter if you can only play 30 minutes a day or 10 hours a day, both are able to get everything if they are dedicated and willing to put the time forward. If you think things should change because some can only play 30 minutes a day and they deserve the chance to get it faster, well you’re playing the wrong game.

Artorous.8573:

Everyone is capable of getting everything in this game as long as they are willing to spend the time on it. If you’re not willing to spend the time to achieve things, such as legendary weapons, then you don’t deserve them. It doesn’t matter if you can only play 30 minutes a day or 10 hours a day, both are able to get everything if they are dedicated and willing to put the time forward. If you think things should change because some can only play 30 minutes a day and they deserve the chance to get it faster, well you’re playing the wrong game.

That is incorrect. You can not finish a dungeon in 30 minutes, meaning you can not get dungeon tokens. Without dungeon tokens, you can not buy the gifts that are required for legendary weapons. This makes obtaining a legendary weapon simply impossible for anyone that can not spend the time required for a full run of a dungeon. A dungeon like Arah may take 4+ hours, depending on how much experience the group has with the dungeon. The legendary staff requires 500 Arah tokens. Are you saying that anyone that can’t play for 4+ hours at a time should never be able to obtain the legendary staff?

Artorous.8573:

t doesn’t matter if you can only play 30 minutes a day or 10 hours a day, both are able to get everything if they are dedicated and willing to put the time forward. If you think things should change because some can only play 30 minutes a day and they deserve the chance to get it faster, well you’re playing the wrong game.

Wrong on both counts. If you can play only 30 minutes per day, you are 100% brick walled from earning dungeon tokens under the current reward design. And nothing in the OP thesis of this thread ever asked for “the chance to get it faster”. The thesis was that right now they effectively have no chance at all.

I don’t know of many people that can only spend 30 minutes a day to begin with, and I am positive that it’s not 80% of the player base. Guess what, Legendary skins are actually able to be purchased off the TC so even a person that can only spend 30 minutes a day can have the opportunity to purchase the weapon after enough time has gone by, even playing 30 minutes a day. Will they be expensive? You betcha. Can someone that has next to no time still acquire them over time? You betcha again.

As for dungeon skins, they are meant to be prestigious things that not everyone has. If you can’t spend the time to get them then don’t complain. You can get gear with the exact same stats by crafting or purchasing it off of a karma vendor. If you want to wear a certain skin, put the time in and get it. Don’t QQ on the forums because your “RL” obligations prevent you from having everything in a video game.

Artorous.8573:

I don’t know of many people that can only spend 30 minutes a day to begin with, and I am positive that it’s not 80% of the player base. Guess what, Legendary skins are actually able to be purchased off the TC so even a person that can only spend 30 minutes a day can have the opportunity to purchase the weapon after enough time has gone by, even playing 30 minutes a day. Will they be expensive? You betcha. Can someone that has next to no time still acquire them over time? You betcha again.

As for dungeon skins, they are meant to be prestigious things that not everyone has. If you can’t spend the time to get them then don’t complain. You can get gear with the exact same stats by crafting or purchasing it off of a karma vendor. If you want to wear a certain skin, put the time in and get it. Don’t QQ on the forums because your “RL” obligations prevent you from having everything in a video game.

You’re talking more than 30 minutes per day in total playtime per day. What you’re not recognizing is how many players can commit to more than 30 minutes in any single session during that day. If you cannot set aside 4 contiguous hours for something like Arah, or 2 contiguous hours for with a static group to even learn most explorable paths (even if that static group can eventually farm some paths within 30 minutes after they’ve learned it well), then you cannot even hope to earn tokens under the current system.

As for your argument about legendary skins not being account/soul bound:

A) Are you certain?
B) Is anyone who goes through that degree of effort to craft it really going to turn around and just sell it?
C) That doesn’t help the situation where all the 8 prestige dungeon gear sets are brick walled from most players currently.

Artorous.8573:

I don’t know of many people that can only spend 30 minutes a day to begin with, and I am positive that it’s not 80% of the player base. Guess what, Legendary skins are actually able to be purchased off the TC so even a person that can only spend 30 minutes a day can have the opportunity to purchase the weapon after enough time has gone by, even playing 30 minutes a day. Will they be expensive? You betcha. Can someone that has next to no time still acquire them over time? You betcha again.

Actually you cant purchase legendary skins off the auction house. You can purchase one single piece, the exotic placeholder weapon. You can’t purchase the gifts, you can’t purchase the clovers, and you can’t purchase the skill points or karma.

Even if you had an endless flow of in game currency, you still cannot ‘buy’ your legendary without a massive time investment still. As it should be. If dungeons are easy, and legendaries are just a “throw $50 in gems at the trading post and buy your legendary setup”, then it just nullifies the greatness and prestige of them. They become worthless and no one cares. Kind of a bummer if you ask me.

What they don’t have, however, is the time or desire to do the social engineering necessary to somehow get themselves into a static dungeon group of 5 skilled players.

This, this so many times.
I just spend like a full 30 minutes trying to organize a group for Arah explore. All of us pretty much only did shard farming before this so we opted to go with the warden route again, since knew what to expect for at least part of that.
But then we met the Giganticus lupicus. This giant chicken kicked ourkitten so hard. After three tries one of our group ragequit and we had gotten exactly zero gains for our efforts. Did we had fun? Maybe with the passing around of the orbs to open the gates. But the rest of the trip was painfully slow and boring pulling of one mob at the time to make progress.

What this learned me is that I apparantly need to have a specific set of gear so my weak elementalist doesn’t die when lupicus sneezes in my direction and that I need to find a very specific group of people that have experience with this dungeon. I simply have no desire to spend a full hour interviewing people if they are ready to take down one specific boss.

I still recall one quote from Anet in which they said that they didn’t wanted to have a “looking for fun” kind of deal in GW2. Yet here we are, required to spend a lot of time on social engineering because else we simply have no chance of getting the cool stuff.
No sir I don’t enjoy that at all.

Considering that dungeons offer purely cosmetic rewards, I don’t understand the attitude of “we are being PUNISHED because we can’t do dungeons!!!” It’s simply not true. If your perception of ‘punished’ is because you can’t obtain the same gear (as quickly) as folks who are able to put the time, coordination, and effort into making themselves look different, then it’s your perception that is flawed, not the design of the system. There is absolutely NO statistical advantage to dungeon armor, period. ArenaNet has said from the beginning that explorable mode dungeons and corresponding gear was designed with the player who wanted difficult content that required time, effort, and coordination to finish. The reward for that time, effort, and coordination is gear that is intended to separate them from the rest. Unfortunately a few of the paths were susceptible to speed running and were undertuned, so people got the gear quickly and it doesn’t necessarily have the same ‘prestige’ (which honestly who cares as long as you like the way that your character looks.)

I’m not sure where this sense of entitlement comes from that so many of you have when it comes to armor skins. You either put in the effort, or you don’t – no one is forcing you to do so, and you don’t NEED it to have a stat based advantage over anyone else.

Should the WvW armor skins be purchasable with dungeon tokens just because I don’t like to do WvW? (which isn’t the case, I love wvw, but theoretically)

Should I be able to purchase all of the skins from the HoM rewards with gems so I don’t have to invest all of the time that the GW1 folks did? I bet that alot of the folks who invested HUNDREDS of hours into GW1 wouldn’t want the titles or armor purchasable.

Based on your logic there should be a way to buy a buff for wvw that gives you 8000 extra health and 4000 additional attack power, so that you can get badges to buy the wvw things you want and get the kills you need for your wvw achievements.

Ultimately no one is forcing you to do dungeons, you don’t have to do them unless you want the skin, and all of you need to stop feeling so entitled. They’re optional content. If you have the time, effort, and social aptitude to put together groups for them, then do them. Don’t try to ruin them for people who like playing the game as it was designed and intended just because you don’t like it.

And before you say that I’m being elitist and wanting things my way just as bad as you want things yours, keep in mind that the difference is that I am supporting keeping things the same. As they were designed. As they were intended. I’m not the one demanding changes.

@Prophet – You can’t buy them now because no one has one yet, and even if they did they wouldn’t be the ones selling it. Notice how you can select Legendary from the Quality section? Legendaries are Pind on Use which means if anyone wants to make one and sell it they are free too. That wont happen for a pretty good while and they are going to be asking huge sums of gold, but if you don’t want to spend the time crafting it yourself you can save up the 500+ gold I’m sure they will be asking for it. Don’t like it? Who cares? They are legendary skins which are meant to be legend, wait for it, dary. Not everyone is going to have one because not everyone is meant to. They are for the most dedicated players.

You went into fullkittenmode once you hit the WvW part. Aside from the fact that it isnt a proper comparison at all (30 minutes of WvW play can be both fun and rewarding, whereas a 30 minute incomplete dungeon run is not) you are comparing a PvE vs a PvP situation.

I don’t get where your sense of entitlement comes from that you want to deny people that don’t have hours upon hours to spend on grinding and/or social engineering the ability to get cool stuff. That’s being elitist alright.

No, expecting to achieve everything without putting in the work required is entitlement. Everyone has access to top end gear by crafting. If you want the unique look then put time into getting it. If you don’t have the time, or don’t want to put the time in, then don’t expect it to be handed to you. There are already plenty of games out there willing to hand you everything with no effort, we don’t need another.

Spoon.3826:

You went into fullkittenmode once you hit the WvW part. Aside from the fact that it isnt a proper comparison at all (30 minutes of WvW play can be both fun and rewarding, whereas a 30 minute incomplete dungeon run is not) you are comparing a PvE vs a PvP situation.

I don’t get where your sense of entitlement comes from that you want to deny people that don’t have hours upon hours to spend on grinding and/or social engineering the ability to get cool stuff. That’s being elitist alright.

Explorables take roughly 30-45 minutes once you learn them, and they’re both fun and rewarding to some players. Again, you’re asking that something be changed based on your preference. I’m not asking for anything to be changed. I like things the way that they are. I’m not the one making demands actually, sorry to disappoint ya

So what’s so cool about it? Does it give you an advantage somewhere in the game? What if the dungeon gear didn’t look different, would you still do it then? If the answer is no, (which it is, 90% of you wouldn’t do dungeons or be whining if there was no aesthetic based reward) then your issue isn’t the difficulty of the dungeons or the time investment, your issue is with the fact that you can’t hack it. I don’t recall seeing any whining or crying feedback when CoF took 20 minutes to do by people who could run around in circles for 90 seconds successfully. The crying came into play when things were buffed to their intended difficulty and half of the egos were bruised.

All I’m seeing here is “Hurr I’m so cool and elitists, all the baddies and casuals have no business here.” plus a bunch of assumptions and dumbness that I won’t even bother replying to. But since you seem to assume so I’ll just clear up that I’m not a casual player with little time on my hands. Sorry to disappoint ya
But I’m not so narrow minded that I cannot see the very valid points the OP is making.

(which it is, 90% of you wouldn’t do dungeons or be whining if there was no aesthetic based reward)

You actually thing anyone would be doing dungeon runs if there wasn’t any kind of reward for doing it? That’s hilariously delusional.

Spoon.3826:

You actually thing anyone would be doing dungeon runs if there wasn’t any kind of reward for doing it? That’s hilariously delusional.

Reality, the place where 90% live? (the 80% mentioned in the title + 10% more because I have to hope it’s true)

I haven’t played in 3 days. Sometimes I log in for 30 minutes. Sometimes I log in for a few hours. Sometimes I log in then out right away because I’m tired. I’m good at games, but I play casually and am in a casual guild of friends. I think the model that it currently has should not be trumped with the OP’s suggestions. It makes absolutely zero sense to offer Dungeon Token Gear as something that you can buy with Karma, or Legendary components as something you can buy with solely tokens. The point of this setup is the separation. At some point, if you keep catering to a strictly casual gameplay, you lose the interest of another crowd. The idea of it being able to be created in a number of different ways is fine with me, as long as the time invested is the same amount despite the recipe.

And to be honest, I don’t deserve a legendary or awesome looking gear if I can’t commit more than 30 minutes at a time to a game. That’s the reality of it, and I like that. At some point, you have to just realize that you don’t have time for games, and if that’s the case, either make time or stop pushing minority ideas and find a new hobby.

I just wish the Legendary weapons had more of…a Legend to them I could read…haha.

if you only have time to play for 30 minutes a day perhaps you should consider playing anything other than an mmo…

OP makes valid, well thought out points, and I’m surprised by the lack of peoples ability to read what he’s saying and comprehend it.

He’s stating that the current curve makes it difficult, if not impossible, for people who cannot commit large continuous chunks of playtime to the game.

He’s asking to make it more casual friendly. Not to dumb it down and let every have their pretty toys because they suck, but to give everyone the option to have a toy, if by earning it through different means.

Ars Valde.8693:

OP makes valid, well thought out points, and I’m surprised by the lack of peoples ability to read what he’s saying and comprehend it.

He’s stating that the current curve makes it difficult, if not impossible, for people who cannot commit large continuous chunks of playtime to the game.

He’s asking to make it more casual friendly. Not to dumb it down and let every have their pretty toys because they suck, but to give everyone the option to have a toy, if by earning it through different means.

Just about every dungeon path in this game can be completed in 30 minutes, naturally if you’re going in with a PuG that doesn’t want to communicate or actually function as a team it’s going to be longer. If 30 minutes is too much time for you then, as an above poster said, go play something other than a MMO.

The whole point of dungeons is to get unique skins. The items themselves have stats that are identical to crafted gear sets as well as karma rewarded sets. If you want the super awesome unique look that only a few others have, then spend the time to get it! Don’t come and say, “My RL priorities are too vast and I can’t spend but 10 minutes playing a video game and due to me being horrible I can’t clear the dungeon so they should be nerfed so I can get everything!”

If you actually better yourself as a player then you can fly through the vast majority of the dungeon paths in a minimal amount of time. Will you get the gear as fast as someone who spends hours a day playing? Nope. Will you get the gear regardless? Hell yes! Unique looks are meant to be unique. Legendary weapons were meant to be just that, legendary. If you don’t like it then you’re playing the wrong game.

actually, from what I can see, the only reason many people aren’t saying ‘yay thanks’ is that the diminishing return system is still broken.

Artorous, you’re missing the point.

A. Not every dungeon CAN be done that way, and that’s AFTER time invested in learning how to work all the mechanics and skills required, which we already discussed that casual players can’t necessarily commit to.

Even further as a ‘hardcore’ player myself, that invests in getting better constantly and learning how to play this game to its fullest, I just spent an hour learning how to NOT do the Ascalon Catacombs, and ended up with a party that quit after the first boss, from frustration. I can’t imagine how a crushed someone on a time limit would be if that happened, to waste all that effort and receive nearly nothing in exchange for it.

2. You’re hyperbolizing what everyone who is disagreeing with you said. We’re not asking for things to be nerfed, we’re not asking to get the rewards in ten minutes, we’re not asking to have everything handed over. In fact the OP suggested curving the skill level of the dungeon with a lower reward table so that everyone can play at their own pace and enjoy the game.

Thirdly: This is an MMO. You are not a unique snowflake, you are not an individual. Your ‘unique’ skin you have is a pretty pixelated display that you had time to grind to get it. Trying to talk down on people because they’d like alternative ways, BALANCED AND FAIR mind you, ways to achieve the same results while being just as skilled as you is just honestly a childish and pisspoor attitude of entitlement on YOUR part. The game is about everyone enjoying themselves in various ways, limiting options to do that is -always- the wrong choice.

Deth.4109:

if you only have time to play for 30 minutes a day perhaps you should consider playing anything other than an mmo…

perhaps you should consider being an adult and having a full time job? but of course you won’t understand till you are older, so no point discussing this. Just know that a lot of older players want to play gw 2 for fun to escape the real world.

But once you hit level 80 and discover it takes 4 – 7 hours which you cannot afford to spend to achieve the things you want on a game, you feel ripped off because the game is advertised for the causal gamer.