Guild Wars 2

I started playing guildwars less than a year ago when a friend of mine bought me a copy for christmas so that we could play together. I remember running around doing map completion and seeing a big door icon on the map and asking him what that was, “that’s a dungeon entrance, I’ll take you through when you are high enough level” and I was super excited to see this content.

Fast forward a little bit and my friend is taking me through my first dungeon path and I am just constantly hugging the floor because I was getting my butt kicked. And you know what? It was incredibly fun. I wanted to get better so that I could do that content with my friend without dying constantly, I wanted to see every single dungeon. I had a bit more free time than my friend so I pugged a few dungeons, feeling nervous about being so bad people would ask me to leave. Instead I had people helping me learn my class, teaching me tricks to make things a bit easier.

It became a strong motivation to reach level 80 so I could get the gear and do the dungeons and have fun. All the while actually learning the mechanics of the game and how to play my class effectively. Something that fractals, due to being lv80 content I would have never experienced as a new player.

I made some new friends because of dungeons and had some really good times with old friends doing late night dungeon runs. Had I never experienced this I probably would not have gotten as into GW as I did.

Yes the changes are “economy based” but when you actively discourage people from playing this content you willingly kill a bit of the community. They might not have been flashy, or exciting after the 100th run, hell they outright broke sometimes, but they were still fun. Yes they will still exist but the amount of players who are actively using the LFG or even wanting to play this content is undoubtedly going to shrink.

I’m just sad that the chances of a new player getting to experience all of that have just greatly diminished. That a new player is going to see that icon on the map and ask “what does that icon mean?” only to get the reply of “oh those are dungeons, but they are dead. Nobody runs those anymore”. It’s just sad to think that what provided a lot of fun for so many people is soon to be reduced to something people only do for legendary gifts or out of sheer boredom/nostalgia with some friends.

I’m pretty sure all MMOs end up this way, or at least the ones I’ve played. Dungeons were fun and I’m sure that some new players would enjoy them as well but let’s face it they’re a small market. I’m glad Anet is moving more towards fractals. It’s still instanced 5 man content and I’m sure new people will have just as much fun with it (I know I loved fractals when they first came out )

I have nothing against fractals at all, in fact I’ve been running fractals more often that dungeons lately. The thing about that is using AC as an example you “can” enter at level 35, its going to be challenging but you have the ability to complete it and as a level 35 feel like you should be able to complete it. For fractals you have that lv80 required, yes there is up-scaling but that’s not really intuitive for a newcomer.

Raids are on a weekly reset and people will run dungeons mostly every day be cause of the rewards. They won’t be ‘dead’. Yes, they are catatonic but still ran by lots of parties. I would appreciate a couple of new dungeons in addition of the raids. Maybe sometime in the future.

Hopefully if dungeons really do tank they will revisit the rewards policy. I am not optimistic though. If you are going for your dungeoneer title it will probably be quicker to do it via PvP for any given path.