Guild Wars 2

Since kids have short attention span, here’s the short version:

The point of this post is that dungeon rewards, with multiple and specific currencies, reward boring and repetitive gameplay better. If you prefer varied and fresh dungeon runs over repeating the same 3 paths in the same dungeon over and over, as any sane human being, you end up with a bunch different tokens and never get to finish a set. it forces you to play in dungeons you don’t like as well, which is made much worse if you’re playing with friends with different gear goals, making "dungeon crawling" with them a very repetitive grinding experience, which diverges from the whole advertised ’philosophy’ behind the game.

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How it becomes limited and grindy:

So, if I want to get a full set of Ascalon Catacombs armor, two axes and a greatsword for my warrior I’ll need to run it.

Armor: 180+160+260+180+240+180 = 1020 1020/60 = 17 runs
Weapons: 300 x 2 + 390 = 990 990/60 = 17 runs

Now let’s say each of my friends want different sets. So make that 170 runs, in only 5 of all dungeons.

You’re asking my friends, who want other sets from other dungeons and don’t like AC to run AC this many times, and you’re asking of me to run their dungeons as well over and over 37 times each. What if we all want to run dungeons that don’t give stuff we want? Like we really like Twilight Arbor and I don’t wanna look like a freaking cabbage head? Why can’t we play the dungeons we want and choose our rewards?

Right now it’s like oh kitten, my friend wants a ghastly axe but AC is so boring so i’ll just tell him to get a pug and not actually play with him or suffer through the dungeon run that was forced on me to play with my friends.

What if we want to run each dungeon’s path once, what do I get in the end with those different tokens? A disjointed-looking set and no weapon at all? Diminished rewards for taking the less repetitive more enjoyable approach to dungeons? oO

SOLUTION TO MAKE THE SYSTEM FLEXIBLE AND FREE PEOPLE TO CHOOSE WHICH DUNGEONS THEY WANT TO PLAY:

A possible solution to make it not grindy, flexible and make playing with friends FUN is to make an unified dungeon currency, or make them tradeable at a1 to 1 rate. That way we can run all dungeons without repeating them too many times and still get a full set of something while not being restricted to a single endless grind in the same dungeon, playing wherever we want to play instead. Isn’t that a LOT more fun and spontaneous? Doesn’t it encourage people to beat all dungeons? Doesn’t it make sense that the more diversified gameplay also results in the same rewards of the repetitive and boring gameplay?

Single dungeon currency, please!!!!

Wrong, they never said there was no grind for prestige sets. There is no grind for lvl 80 max stat gear. And really you have the gall to complain about a system that allows you to get full exotics from the dungeon of your choice in 12 days assuming you aren’t willing to run on DR? And that’s on top of the 26+ silver you get for completion and gear you can vendor or salvage. Plus, in AC there are at least to graveling champs that drop 5 silver a piece, 7 with the omnomberry buff and 15 (buffed to 21s) from the boss. Drop your run time to 45 minutes and you’re getting 61s +gear +tokens in 45 minutes, 3 times a day.

Seriously, stop whining about grinding for prestige gear, do the dungeons you find fun, learn to master the encounters, or go play Skyrim and use console commands to hack in a million plus damage daedric greatsword, it makes no difference to me, or anyone here.

I doubt the devs will go for a single currency, but I could see a hybrid system. A dungeon could reward both its specific token plus a new generic dungeon token. Dungeon sets would cost a few dungeon specific tokens plus a larger amount of the generic tokens.

For example, a weapon that costs 300 of a specific dungeon token would instead cost say 60 dungeon specific tokens and 240 generic tokens. These are just example numbers, could weight it differently. Would also require a forced conversion of all old tokens into the appropriate split of specific/generic tokens (with my example, it would be 100 current = 20 specific and 80 generic, but again, just as an illustrative example).

I see where the OP is coming from. I’ll do all the dungeon paths eventually, just because its content, may even repeat the ones I like or have friends who want to repeat them. But I care for very few of the dungeon reward skins – like 1 light set, maybe 2 of the mediums, and only 1 heavy – and just a couple of the weapons. So, for me, most of the tokens I earn will be useless.

Ender.3508:

Wrong, they never said there was no grind for prestige sets. There is no grind for lvl 80 max stat gear. And really you have the gall to complain about a system that allows you to get full exotics from the dungeon of your choice in 12 days assuming you aren’t willing to run on DR? And that’s on top of the 26+ silver you get for completion and gear you can vendor or salvage. Plus, in AC there are at least to graveling champs that drop 5 silver a piece, 7 with the omnomberry buff and 15 (buffed to 21s) from the boss. Drop your run time to 45 minutes and you’re getting 61s +gear +tokens in 45 minutes, 3 times a day.

Seriously, stop whining about grinding for prestige gear, do the dungeons you find fun, learn to master the encounters, or go play Skyrim and use console commands to hack in a million plus damage daedric greatsword, it makes no difference to me, or anyone here.

Hmm… that’s odd, crafting feels like grinding to me. Repeated dungeon runs of the same type 34+ times while being punished by a DR system that seems to be finally working in some sense, feels like grinding to me, getting the gold to buy crafted exotics, feels like grinding to me and yet, those are how you get exotic level gear.

Am I missing something here or is there some magical way of getting an exotic set?

Pure aesthetic =/= prestige

Statistical advantage does not, you can argue they’re not required, and that would be in my own opinion subjectively true, but you still claim they at some point they turned from their main advert of a while, and went from “we don’t want you to grind” to “we’re going to set goals you have to grind for, but we’re going to slap a DR to stop you getting there”

what they mean by “we don’t WANT you grinding” did that not mean they wanted a simple enough gear progression that never demeaned itself but started out easy enough and casual friendly? unlike WoW that did the opposite but instead mean they merely wanted to deliberately slow us down for snowflakes? believe me I don’t want to seem like I want everything handed to us on a plate, but what else do we call it all but grind? and “prestige” is something aesthetic you can show off for your achievements, and not a functional piece of armor with superior stats, that’s just gear progression lol…

and it’s not even the highest tier…

When I hit 80 I had greens and yellows from around lvl 65-79. Lvl 80 rares are easily craftable, and greens can be found in orr. Everything I needed have a guildie craft my exotic set was found in a matter of a few days of casual playing, including the gold needed to buy the stuff I didnt have. I didn’t grind for hours on the most efficient money/mats making scheme I could find, I PLAYED the GAME.

Yeah I know, tough concept to truly grasp. If your one goal is to go get your hardmode armor, then strap in and prepare for a grind. Just know that there are others who are actually enjoying the game, and will pick up their pieces of armor after they’ve enjoyably run enough dungeons.

Christ how whiney can you be, AN has effectively doubled the rate at which you can gain tokens if you’re willing to do something other than (insert easiest dungeon path) 92387423 times.

I think you are missing a core part of the OP’s argument.

Say there are friends A, B, C, D, and E. They’re played MMOs together in the past and want to run dungeons together. However, being human, they all have different preferences in what dungeon set look they like. A likes the Ascalonian, B likes Caud, C likes the Twilight set, etc.

However much grind it takes to get a set, they’ll have to do it 5 times over, each getting a full set of tokens for 4 dungeons they don’t want sets from. The only alternative is for the friends not to run the dungeons together – but its what they like to do. So, likely, they move on to another game.

Joiry.2504:

I think you are missing a core part of the OP’s argument.

Say there are friends A, B, C, D, and E. They’re played MMOs together in the past and want to run dungeons together. However, being human, they all have different preferences in what dungeon set look they like. A likes the Ascalonian, B likes Caud, C likes the Twilight set, etc.

However much grind it takes to get a set, they’ll have to do it 5 times over, each getting a full set of tokens for 4 dungeons they don’t want sets from. The only alternative is for the friends not to run the dungeons together – but its what they like to do. So, likely, they move on to another game.

Thank you for actually reading the post to the end and paying attention to its title.

It’s not grindy to get top stat gear, i fully agree and this post has nothing to do with it, if you don’t have the time/attention span to read a post to the end, don’t bother posting a reply.

The point of this post is that it’s extremely unrewarding to play the dungeons you want to play opposed to grinding the same dungeon over and over AND it keeps you from playing with your friends if you have different gear goals.

I agree 100% with the OP.

Plus this below:

Joiry.2504:

I doubt the devs will go for a single currency, but I could see a hybrid system. A dungeon could reward both its specific token plus a new generic dungeon token. Dungeon sets would cost a few dungeon specific tokens plus a larger amount of the generic tokens.

This is a very good idea.

I would like it, but dont see it likely to ever happen :/

Tweaking the required tokens for an armor piece for each dungeon would be required though, since some are harder/take longer then others.

1. Daily generic token like was listed before

2. Conversion system. Something like min 60 tokens from “X” dungeon = 30 tokens to “Y” dungeon. Not enough to make it so that you can get by doing cheap easy dungeon to get the set super fast, but not too low that it isn’t something disregarded.

All gear has exotic stats, they’re all equal in power to each other. Aesthetic value is not measurable and varies from person to person. I, for instance, think the heavy Arah gear looks like a makeshift halloween costume, even though it’s the last 80 dungeon, to me it’s probably the worst-looking armor in the entire game. So there’s no need to have a conversion rate in place other than 1 to 1.

And if people want to farm the "easiest" path in the "easiest" dungeon over and over let them play like zombies. It’s not like they’re gaining any unfair advantage over others.

Never. Single dungeon currency is the worst idea I’ve heard so far.
You want a specific set, you do the dungeon ? what’s the problem ???
If your friends want different sets than you then bad news you either run with him and do something with the tokens or each of you run your own dungeons…

Harbard.5738:

It’s not grindy to get top stat gear, i fully agree and this post has nothing to do with it, if you don’t have the time/attention span to read a post to the end, don’t bother posting a reply.

The point of this post is that it’s extremely unrewarding to play the dungeons you want to play opposed to grinding the same dungeon over and over AND it keeps you from playing with your friends if you have different gear goals.

Problem is then everyone is going to do the easiest/fastest dungeons to get gear for all the harder dungeons. What’s the two hardest dungeons right now? CoE and Arah? If I can do TA and CoF and collectively get 360 tokens from those two runs and trade it in for Arah gear, it would kitten off all the people who worked hard to achieve finishing Arah. So I’m not sure how this would work.

Agreed. I can see the opposing arguments but what it boils down to is that the current system just isn’t fun for a lot of people. How can anyone stand to do the exact same content over and over again? Unique currencies just seem to make the game unnecessarily restrictive.

I can appreciate both sides of this argument, but I feel inclined to support the individual dungeon tokens. After all, the particular dungeon reward armor is associated with that particular dungeon. It would be a little peculiar to get the Flame Legion armor having done only AC.

All people need to do is stop thinking of it as doing Ascalon Catacombs in order to get Ascalon Catacombs gear, and to start thinking of it as doing dungeons to get Dungeon Gear. Same basic principle as Karma. All quests reward Karma, all Karma vendors take it, regardless of where it is earned.

How about a way to convert tokens from 1 dungeon in tokes of another dungeon albeit with a cost in the exchange… e.g. 20 arah tokesn give you 10 CoE tokes… or something like that.
Wouldn’t that be a workable solution?!

I think the downsides outweigh the positives, now that A) The dungeon rewards have been drastically increased per daily run, and B) The tokens are account-bound I have a hard time buying the idea that you’re ever getting ‘useless’ tokens.

Before the changes to rewards, it did genuinely feel useless to run a dungeon that didn’t have the specific gear you wanted, because you needed to play a dungeon upward of ten times to get the cheaper items; now, you can get an offhand after as little as four runs, a one-handed weapon after five, and a two-handed weapon after seven runs. While I can understand not wanting to pick up stray armour pieces here and there, since a lot of them look really bad without at least a few matching pieces, I don’t think that argument holds as much water when it comes to being able to pick up exotic weapons. Weapons don’t have to match anything, and you need to have quite an armory of level 80 exotic gear built up before new stat configurations stop being useful.

And of course, tokens being account-bound means that it’s perfectly possible to just bank tokens and then get ‘free’ level 80 exotic gear on another character as soon as they hit level 80 (or if you’re willing to transmute, start a newbie character and immediately have access to high-end equipment models).

When compared to the downside – having the player base naturally gravitate to the same handful of dungeon paths that are exceptionally easy or even just having an “it” path that every player learns to do, to the exclusion of being able to competently play any other path – I’d prefer that tokens stay dungeon-specific.

If the playerbase moves to a single dungeon/run it’s not the reward’s system fault, it’s because all other runs are boring or this specific run/dungeon is too short or too easy.

Moreover, if most of the player base buy games to have *fun* like I believe that’s GW2 selling point and the kind of player that the game attracts the most, they will play the dungeons they like best, the most fun, if not all, just for variety’s sake.

If it results in some dungeons/runs being less played, that will just show the devs which dungeons perhaps need work to be more fun/engaging.

On top of that, with the diminished returns system, variety in runs will actually be encouraged.

So, in the end, what is best? To have a restrictive system that forces you to repeat content or have a system where you play what you want and choose your rewards and are free to play with your friends the way you want without having to figure "ok A needs X runs here, then B needs Y runs there"?

I’ve never done CoE explorable. Right now if you ask me to go, I’m looking at it as needing to go not just this one time, but more than a dozen additional runs before I can get something. That puts a “barrier to entry,” if you remember your micro-economics 101.

It’d be nice if there were a way to salvage some value out of small sets of runs that don’t earn enough for a payoff (without doing a whole bunch more runs).

Crater.1625:

When compared to the downside – having the player base naturally gravitate to the same handful of dungeon paths that are exceptionally easy or even just having an “it” path that every player learns to do, to the exclusion of being able to competently play any other path – I’d prefer that tokens stay dungeon-specific.

This downside is only a downside if the dungeons are poorly designed or poorly tuned.

I think better not to cover up poor design/tuning with a discouraging reward system, and just get them done right. I don’t know if they have the talent to do it right, but don’t fall into the trap of covering up faulty game design with more bad design (which seems to be a theme in GW2).