Dungeon fixes:
There is a few things which I find really sad and bad about dungeons:
which contributes to a none fun, but more rewarding dungeon run playstyle.
First: people selling runs.
The idea of buying/selling dungeon rewards I find saddening, the point of dungeons is to incentivise people to have fun running them. The whole focus of “selling runs” breaks this completely.
Two: skipping most of the dungeon.
The ability to run pass everything skipping the vast majority of the dungeon is again counter intuitive to the design and idea of the devs when looking at dungeons.
It also forces people to do so because rewards are scaled for “time to complete” and time to complete is determined by average time.
Both of these ends up hurting the overall gameplay by the focus going from Fun to Effectiveness.
It is the endless discussion within game design of “Effective != Fun” which means that the most effective way to achieve a goal is not always the most fun one.
The more you allow people to exploit around to optimize reward, the more you pressure people to do what is “less fun, but vastly more rewarding” which creates a bad gameplay overall.
So now, I explained the issue I will come with some extremely simple and easy fixes.
First last fix the skipping part:
There are two ways of fixing this:
1: you set up barriers/doors/invisible walls for each room area that stops progression and doesn’t disappear before you killed all enemies up to that point.
2: when aggroing a boss, all enemies up until that boss will auto agro you and never lose agro again before they are all killed or boss loses agro. Should the boss die without losing agro the mobs will NEVER lose agro (so any exploit trying to get around this will mean you need to either clear the mobs afterwards or restart the run).
Lets fix the other issue:
Selling of runs: you are supposed to be rewarded due to your contribution to the entire run. Therefore I suggest the set in a system which monitors assist kills of enemies, it very simple looks at how many kills of the enemies where you are part of and it rewards you on a % scale.
So if you where only there for 0% of the kills up until the boss then you get 0% rewards. If you where there for 80% of the kills you get 80% of the reward.
In this manner you are rewarded on how much of the run you actually contributed too.
(the contribution should look at mob groups, so if you hit a mob of the mob group or do a positive thing on a group member or if you are just within 2.500 distance of a mob that dies, all mobs in that group is tagged as you being a contributor.
If you die, resurrect and does not get back in time, you still get full contribution for all mobs which was in the group you attacked.
If your team then ignores you and keep going even though you are not back you will not get contribution for anything they kill without you being there)
The contribution is supposed to be set up in a way that forces you to be part of the action to get any rewards, but do not punish you for being unlucky or bad at it.