Guild Wars 2

As I prepare for the journey to gear my character up with exotics, I’m struck by a simple question: Why do dungeons give unique tokens?

At first glance, the answer is simple: dungeon sets require running and re-running the same place to thematically link each set to its inspiration. Why would I run Twilight’s Arbor for Ascalonian Catacombs gear? But dig deeper and we’re left with a situation that sacrifices “fun” and “community” in the pursuit of purity.

Guild Wars 2 is a cornucopia of interesting things to do. Level scaling allows us to fluidly shift to any content that we want to play now: Story Dungeons, Explorable Dungeons, Character Stories, Par-Level Zones, Beginner Zones, PvP, etc. Until we try and acquire our dungeon sets. Then we need to grind away at a single zone to the exclusion of other content. We can’t even choose our grind: gear stat mixes necessitate a very limited choice. This is far from ideal.

It’s even worse when attempting to pair up with friends. Different classes gravitate towards specific types of gear. This means that the dungeon that I need to stick to for my grind might be completely different from my pal’s target; we either choose to play apart or throw away progression. A community built around dynamically chipping in becomes locked into separate treadmills. Why would I fulfill a TA group’s LF1M when my dungeon set comes from AC? Unique dungeon tokens fragment the playerbase and push us to be selfish.

Why don’t we use a unified currency for dungeon sets? While it would sacrifice some thematic appropriateness, we would be encouraged to pursue fun wherever and with whomever we desire. If certain paths are uniquely easy or short it would be trivial to balance their token rewards around difficulty; ideally each path would offer a similar risk-to-reward ratio.

Guild Wars 2 is supposed to innovate in reducing grind and enabling fun; dungeon tokens offer the opportunity to take this philosophy one step further.

I guess more people will quit earlier if tokens were universal. Meh, havent gave it much thoughts.

Restricting tokens to just one type would kill most of the dungeons. You would see hordes of players running AC/CoF only to get the Orrian armors.

because dungeons have unique weapons/armor?

if universal tokens were to happen most people would stand outside the easiest dungeon and then buy gear from the harder dungeons. And the few who do want to play the dungeon for fun wount be able to do so because there is too few people playing it.

why can you and your friend play the same dungeon regardless of the fact that you need to do different dungeons to get different gear ?? how hard is it to help each other out and have fun switching between playing 2 dungeons instead of just grinding 1 ????

the system is fine the way it is, Universal Tokens even at a reduced rate of exchange would be terrible

and you can use tokens for other things as opposed to gearing yourself, like salvaging for ecto’s or throwing weapons into the forge for a free gamble at a precursor.

Because tokens are related to the gift and gear set of that particular dungeon. Variety, something to chase, something to dream, like arah armor. This keeps the player interested.

Lorana.2468:

the system is fine the way it is, Universal Tokens even at a reduced rate of exchange would be terrible

and you can use tokens for other things as opposed to gearing yourself, like salvaging for ecto’s or throwing weapons into the forge for a free gamble at a precursor.

I’m not sure the system is “fine” the way it is, but a system of universal tokens could create more problems than it solves in GW2. You’d have to be very careful about how you handle the exchange rate.

You’d have to consider not only the difference between dungeon completion times, but also LFG wait times. If the shorter dungeon becomes so popular that you can get a group within 5 minutes, but the longer dungeons have a 30 minute wait, you’d just added 25 minutes onto the longer dungeon run.

If they were going to implement a token exchange, the best way to do it would be to have a system where the tokens from each dungeon have different exchange rates. The longest dungeons could be exchanged at a rate of 1:1, while shorter dungeons would require reduced rates, based on their relative average completion time + average LFG wait time. It would be a lot of work to get that balance right, and potentially game breaking to get it wrong.

-Travail.

They give unique tokens to match the achievement to the effort. If I could run AC a million times and get any of the armor skins, none of those armor skins would carry the prestige of actually having mastered the dungeon they’re related to.

Rob has also confirmed this; search his post history if you’re interested.

Hmm, maybe I approached this question from the wrong direction. My beef isn’t that you have to run Dungeon X for the Dungeon X Set, it’s that dungeon running into a cohesive set of statistics requires mind-numbing repetition of content.

What if there were boring brown sets of each exotics stat type that accepted any dungeon token as currency? That way I could mix and match explorable modes without “wasting” progress towards getting exotics, while dungeon set owners could still showcase their “dedication.”

getting armor set from dungeons is optional, well at least for most stats combinations.

i see dungeon armors/weapons only as skins. so different tokens = different skin. wouldn’t be fun if i could buy any skin for ‘universal’ token.
and what makes those skins unique now, is that u cannot just ‘buy’ them from market. therefor they are proof you made it through the dungeon.

Right, so why not add “boring skin” sets that we can work on by running different dungeons?

My only wish would be to enable players to get armours with any kind of stat distribution (TA set with zerker’s stats for instance). Universal tokens is bad idea for reasons said already by few posters before.

haviz.1340:

My only wish would be to enable players to get armours with any kind of stat distribution (TA set with zerker’s stats for instance). Universal tokens is bad idea for reasons said already by few posters before.

That wouldn’t encourage you to buy transmutation stones, now. Would it?

That wouldn’t be good for business.

If you’re only concerned about stats, several dungeons have the same stat set, so you don’t have to run the same over and over. For example, soldiers stats (power, vit, tough) can be obtained from HotW, SE and I thiiiink CM. you can spread the grind between 3 dungeons for the stat.

Edit: as far as your idea goes. I’d be okay with a vendor that sold all the dungeon armors stats for any tokens at the same price per piece and they had a basic skin like WvW karma armor.

HappyHubris.1096:

Why don’t we use a unified currency for dungeon sets? While it would sacrifice some thematic appropriateness, we would be encouraged to pursue fun wherever and with whomever we desire. If certain paths are uniquely easy or short it would be trivial to balance their token rewards around difficulty; ideally each path would offer a similar risk-to-reward ratio.

Guild Wars 2 is supposed to innovate in reducing grind and enabling fun; dungeon tokens offer the opportunity to take this philosophy one step further.

Because if they did that everyone would just run CoF path 1 and no other dungeon path ever…… also SE path 3, AC 1&2 (3 is also easy but a bit harder than the other two) etc etc It will ruin dungeons even more than they are now (finding a group for anything other the above is a real pain) So a big BIG no to universal tokens.

What I would like them to do is give us a full exotic set of our choice when we finish every single dungeon once, it will both spread the community to all dungeons (unlike your proposal) and will allow people to get their gear together, regardless of what kind of gear a specific dungeon offers. It will also be a great challenge ^^

There are a total of 25 paths that will reward 1500 tokens total plus the 3 tokens you get per boss, more than enough for a full exotic set

That would be a great way of getting Ascended gear in dungeons, instead of…. tokens. I DO hope we won’t get dungeon Ascended gear by either RNG or tokens, both are terrible ways to get them

I can see the benefits, but the costs of such a system outweigh them. Some dungeons (Arah, CoE) would die, and others would be constantly run (AC or other easier ones). It would imbalance it badly. In the end, it would damage ‘variety playing’ more than it would help.

They give unique tokens to compartmentalize Dev screw ups.

If they accidentally make a path trivially easy, it keeps there from being a universal dungeon currency that makes ALL rewards for dungeons trivially easy to acquire.

Seperate currencies buys them time to fix goofs.