Guild Wars 2

I see the need to fix dungeons because your initial system is flawed and should have been thrown out during design phase as all the problems are very obvious to everyone.

If you are trying to discourage people from speed runs and grinding one path, the only realistic solution that makes sense is the following:

ONE Piece of Armour/Weapon each time you completed ALL paths of one dungeon.

This will make people run ALL of the paths 6 times for the complete armour set. A reasonable and perfectly balanced amount of time.

It will make people run them more than 6 times for weapons.

Make it so you can complete an armour piece only once a day** and you end up with: One week to get a set of armour for the hardcore. 3-4 Weekends for casual players. You could scale this to make it twice or 3 times as long if 6 days is too short. It will still encourage players to complete all of the dungeons resulting in more varied content and less grind.

(**you can still do the dungeons as often as you want for exp/gold/drops)

You see how easy it is to balance content, remove grind and still make the game rewarding?

Edited by moderator:call-out

HxCFTW.8192:

I take it that you’re a WoW player? I hated the fact that you could only run the good dungeons once a day or get it again if you were lucky though the dungeon finder. No thanks.

You seem to have misunderstood 2 things here:

1.) You could run the dungeons more than once a day, you just wont get the completion reward. However, seeing as this game is not drop based there would be no real reason to unless you grind for experience. Which you could still do!

2.) I played WoW for the free 30 days then quit, it’s a really bad game.

Cheers | Skyrant Kangaroomouse

Skyrant, you are right. Your suggestion would be a good improvement.

There are many ways you can improve the overall architecture of PvE gameplay. I was always irritated by the imaginationless way in which Blizzard designed their overall endgame PvE gameplay. But to be honest, other companies seem to do even worse. E.g. in Tera, endgame consisted of 1) buying the highend (T12/T13) gear with gold, 2) be lucky when enchanting your gear. Other MMOs didn’t even have a system at max-level. I can’t understand that when a company invests $50-100M into an MMO, they can’t hire some people who really understand how to design PvE endgame.

It’s a system. You need to approach it from a systemic point of view. There are goals. There are mechanisms. You just need to put it all together in a smart way. I can’t see why it can’t be done. Your suggestion is already a huge improvement. There will always be whiners. There will always be people who look only at their own interest. But as a game-designer you can make something that is cool and fun for all your customers.

Really good idea. Wish they would implement this.

It’s stupid that the dungeon gear obtainment is based right now on beating a certain number of bosses. Even though dungeon rewards are greater for a full clear than farming the same boss an amount of times equal to the number of bosses in that run, it’s still more efficient to farm the same boss over and over.

Gryzemuis’s rules for PvE endgame.

1) The largest chunk of your customers are gonna be the average players. You certainly need to make sure there is enough content for them.
2) The elite players will never be satisfied. Even if you make very hard content, some of them will still think it needs to be harder. However, you need to make (some) content for them too. If only so that the average players have something to work and look forward too.
3) There are players who are just not good at gaming. Or just slow. But they need some content too. The challenge here is to make sure their content is fun, easy, but doesn’t make them look like they are pariahs. They need some nice rewards too.

4) Forcing your players to wait, or spread out their playing hours, is not a bad thing. Gated content. Being able to do a dungeon only once a day. This will increase the longlevity of your content. It will prevent people from burning out. It might help some people to get their school diplomas.

5) In an RPG, the strength of the character should be more important than the strength of the player behind the character. That is the nature of the game of RPGs. This helps players to progress through the game. If results completely depend on the “skills” of the player, then he will run into a plateau. That will be “game over”. But when a player can improve his character, he can keep progressing through the game. ArenaNet’s design philosophy goes completely against that. I think that is a handicap to design a path for all players through PvE game-content.

6) Objectives should be hard to obtain when the content is released. At first, the elite players will come play the content. It being hard means they will spend a lot of time. It’ll keep them busy. But after a while (weeks, months) the content can be made easier. Not by just nerfing it. Nerfing is not fun for the elite players who done it the old way. But also it is not fun for new players, who want to be able to say: “they beat that content too”. You need to help slower players with better gear, better abilities, etc to prepare them for the harder content.

7) New content should not only be hard, but also require a lot of playing time. But when the content is not new anymore, the playing time should be radically reduced. Example: suppose you have T1 and T2 endgame content. The average players play T1. The elite is already in T2. T2 should be hard. It should take 8 or 12 weeks to get all the gear (on average). Now after 12 weeks, T3 content is released. The elite players move forward. Now the average players need to move forward to T2. Don’t do this by nerfing T2. It would be better if average players would get full T1-gear, to help them do T2 content. So what is needed: increase drop-rates or decrease token-cost, so that average players can get a full set of T1-gear in a week, and a full set of T2-gear in 2-3 weeks. Result: the elite is still ahead playing in T3-content, the average players are getting more loot, while still they have to beat the content. They get T1&T2 gear fast, so that helps them progress faster.
In GW2, gear doesn’t work this way, I know. I am curious to see what kind of solution ArenaNet has thought of to allow players to progress through all PvE content.

I could go on an on.
Maybe I’ll edit this post later with more points.
Although it’s not like it’s gonna make a difference.

Well, based on their original philosophy, why make us repeat the dungeon more than once at all?

I said this from the beginning…the a.net devs built a game based off WoW mechanics, and just removed what they didn’t like. The offspring was a distorted hybrid that just doesn’t do anything well.

See DEs, see dungeon strategies, see horrible token grind, see zergfest WvW.

I really thought the a.net devs were different. Their ‘philosophy’ however, seems to be a marketing pitch, while their game design is the same as all the others.

frOst.2198:

Well, based on their original philosophy, why make us repeat the dungeon more than once at all?

I said this from the beginning…the a.net devs built a game based off WoW mechanics, and just removed what they didn’t like. The offspring was a distorted hybrid that just doesn’t do anything well.

See DEs, see dungeon strategies, see horrible token grind, see zergfest WvW.

I really thought the a.net devs were different. Their ‘philosophy’ however, seems to be a marketing pitch, while their game design is the same as all the others.

They said we would get a reward/piece of armor every time. Since there are 6 pieces (excluding trinkets and weapons) it’s reasonable to assume you need to run the dungeon 6 times.

I don’t have a problem with that. What i have a problem with is how the dungeons are designed.

If they want people to spend a lot of time doing this “endgame” then they need to make it fun as well as challenging.

Add 5 trinkets to the Dungeon vendors that have special stats and voila, you just extended the content without changing the content.

Just making it impossibly hard i not the solution.

I think what they are going for is making dungeon armor the equivelant to fissure armor in gw 1

The dungeon design is fine as is. The goal is to work towards the armour set not just freely given it after each completion. That would defeat the purpose and make the armour even less rewarding. The dungeons are not about instant reward as many people in the forums are wanting. They are about working to achieve something greater. Speed runs diminish that as well as people using exploits which is why in the patch they destroyed both since it destroyed the since of achievement. Like Prestige armour in GW1 took a long time to get and you had to work yourkitten off to be able to get it either through mass farming or running.

Marrikk.7468:

Really good idea. Wish they would implement this.

It’s stupid that the dungeon gear obtainment is based right now on beating a certain number of bosses. Even though dungeon rewards are greater for a full clear than farming the same boss an amount of times equal to the number of bosses in that run, it’s still more efficient to farm the same boss over and over.

One thing most game developers seem to forget is that once players start to voluntarily grind the same content using “exploits” or speed runs then something is wrong with the rest of your content.

I know from personal experience that it is very hard to be objective with something you worked on for a year or more. Being professional however requires you to be able to take a step back and examine the big picture. Loosing sight of that is a recipe for failure.

I don’t think everything needs to be massively reward driven, but Anet have assigned a currency system to dungeons and people see it as a path to acquire gear.

Given it is a gear path and they have put a token currency value on completing it they then feel they need to tweak the experience so you can’t get a full set of exotic gear in a couple of days farming easy dungeons.

Gathering materials from nodes or killing mobs that drop T6 materials isn’t challenging either, you can do it without any real risk even with the most pathetic of combat characters in substandard gear.

I don’t see why they didn’t put T6 crafting materials on champion bosses, that spawn slowly, and put T6 resources standing under said mobs with pack of trash around them making it hard for anyone to craft anything at any speed without a small army around them.

It is basically what they have done to Dungeons.

My advice would be to get the tokens off the dungeons, make the dungeons fun but also have a ball breaking difficulty mode for people who seem to like obnoxious mechanics.

Dungeons should have been fun, rewards should have been reasonable and modest. If I am going to run something over and over for months or years, and not just until I have got whatever loot I am after, then it needs to be fun foremost.

Message I am telling our guild people, if you want to see dungeons do them now because you wont have a hope in hell of seeing them in a month or two time unless you want to risk a scrub pug and I would rather shoot myself in the head than try and do these dungeons with random noobs.