Guild Wars 2

Serious question. I just can’t seem to wrap my head around it. How is it that a company completely abandons such a huge chunk of it’s PvE content?

I’ve never seen another MMO do this before. Instead of reworking/fixing dungeons, they nerf it and just leave it broken, forcing players to do other things like fractals and raids.

Has Anet given a reason why they forever abandoned dungeons, or will they ever go back and fix them?

Many Pesky Monk.3140:

forcing players to do other things like fractals and raids.

You answered your own question

That doesn’t excuse them from abandoning dungeons altogether. I understand if that is where they want all of their focus to be on (fractals/raids) but to completely disregard a HUGE chunk of PvE content for literally no good reason is…alarming.

They did not “nerf” dungeons. All they did was slightly reduce the gold gotten. The rewards are still the same, the dungeons are the same.

On the other hand they do now have the new 10 man dungeon/raid available.

You aren’t wrong, it’s pretty crazy for a developer to disregard such a visceral part of a game. Then again most of the problems are down to poor coding more than level design i.e. you could literally skip an entire path of arah because events aren’t triggered(/weren’t) in a linear fashion.

I’m pretty sure Fractals were the only viable solution for them as they are easily managed in comparison to the multi-path/lore intensive design of dungeons.

I can’t say why dungeons were abandoned, but I can say it’s one of the reasons I resubbed WoW. =P

Dungeons are strung together with difficult-to-parse scripting and are very hard to diagnose when issues come up. Fractals create an environment that’s much easier to simply drop in a new Fractal, whereas dungeons require massive amounts of terrain design and map locations, and require lots of very specific custom skins associated with them. In the case of Fractals, a lot of these things are much lower impact.

I’m not surprised ANet dropped dungeons, honestly. They were an unsustainable system.

The reality is people do not miss dungeons at all, they miss the easy gold. Plain and simple, if you liked dungeons you will always be able to find like minded people and still run them. There are guilds that are devoted to this, they are still there to run.

As to why were they were abandoned it was because ANET tried several times to improve them. You say, why don’t they just revamp them. Well they did (AC), people started to run them less. You say, why don’t they make new ones with better mechanics. Well they did (TA:Aether), people don’t run them at all. So why should ANET spend time and money (development resources) on a part of the game that people don’t run. People are complaining not because of lack of dungeons but because the easy gold is no longer there, that is the hard truth. Now if you want that gold it is hard and it takes time to learn, people don’t want to put in the effort.

Plain and Simple.

Beorn Raukar.4328:

The reality is people do not miss dungeons at all, they miss the easy gold. Plain and simple, if you liked dungeons you will always be able to find like minded people and still run them. There are guilds that are devoted to this, they are still there to run.

As to why were they were abandoned it was because ANET tried several times to improve them. You say, why don’t they just revamp them. Well they did (AC), people started to run them less. You say, why don’t they make new ones with better mechanics. Well they did (TA:Aether), people don’t run them at all. So why should ANET spend time and money (development resources) on a part of the game that people don’t run. People are complaining not because of lack of dungeons but because the easy gold is no longer there, that is the hard truth. Now if you want that gold it is hard and it takes time to learn, people don’t want to put in the effort.

Plain and Simple.

That’s not really true. The only change they did to AC was nerfing some damage output and fixing an issue with those burrow things in that boss/event (can’t remember the name) as well as with the lovers boss. Aside that, they didn’t change any of the glaring issues. TA is the same thing. They added a new dungeon that just sucked. It looked awesome, and if it worked right it would be an amazing dungeon. But theres too much griefing, adds take too long to die and they hit too hard. And, of course, one of the biggest issues (that is game wide) is the rewards.

So, you can’t just say that they tried and people didn’t like it. Their efforts were kitten, and dungeons weren’t fun and still aren’t fun. Instead of apologizing to the community and PROPERLY revamping them, they just abandon the content altogether without even properly acknowledging it to the community. They have not once in the years that this game has been out released a statement concerning dungeons.

kitten, there isn’t even a dungeon team anymore.

So please, don’t make excuses for them.

“Over the last couple of years, dungeons have been a major part of the game’s economy; between unique armor and liquid rewards, they’re often farmed. In the expansion, we’ll move away from this paradigm. As the game progressed, we shifted focus from dungeons to fractals and raids, and we firmly believe that fractals and raids are the content that we want to continue to support. As a part of that process, we’ll shift some rewards away from dungeons and into other pieces of content. While dungeons will remain cool experiences that’ll reward players with unique items, their liquid rewards will be reduced and other content will become more rewarding. The shift in rewards is a direct representation of our focus on raids and fractals and our commitment to make them the best they can be.”

Source: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/the-guild-wars-2-heart-of-thorns-economy/

However, they said this in the recent AMA:

“We’re continuing to focus on Fractals as our primary focus for 5-man content. However, given the reaction, we are taking a second look at the current dungeon rewards.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/48zlyd/im_mike_obrien_here_with_gw2_dev_team_ama/d0nwov7

“Simple answer, yes. We didn’t need to nerf dungeons like that. But we also don’t have a dungeons team to keep dungeons updates. So that’s the dilemma.
Guild Wars 2 is a big game with a lot of dev needs. My personal focus is to ensure that we do a great job of anything we choose to do. I’m all about doing fewer things and doing them better. So we have no current plan to staff a dungeons team; no free developers to staff one with.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/48zlyd/im_mike_obrien_here_with_gw2_dev_team_ama/d0nxj76?context=10000

“…nope, no new dungeons. Not now, anyway :(”
https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/48zlyd/im_mike_obrien_here_with_gw2_dev_team_ama/d0nxwsj?context=10000

Basically, they have no dungeon team, aren’t planning on making a dungeon team, and they want to focus on fractals & raids. However, they are looking at adjusting the dungeon rewards in some way.

Well, people are always praising anet for doing things differently than other MMOs, so don’t complain when they actually did that =p

Many Pesky Monk.3140:

So, you can’t just say that they tried and people didn’t like it. Their efforts were kitten, and dungeons weren’t fun and still aren’t fun. Instead of apologizing to the community and PROPERLY revamping them, they just abandon the content altogether without even properly acknowledging it to the community. They have not once in the years that this game has been out released a statement concerning dungeons.

kitten, there isn’t even a dungeon team anymore.

So please, don’t make excuses for them.

-.-a
So why do you want back something that you found not fun?

They abandoned dungeons because they abandon basically everything they make (when was the last time they added a new guild mission?), and then finalized it by gutting the rewards to drive people into fractals and raids (read: make them cough up the $50 for HoT). No more, no less.

Rising Dusk.2408:

I’m not surprised ANet dropped dungeons, honestly. They were an unsustainable system.

I’m not surprised either. That’s more an indictment on Anet though.

Other mmorpgs don’t seem to have problems with creating and maintaining such <5 or 5 man instanced content.

Fractals are completely soulless , the instabilities are garbage and the AR system is alt unfriendly.

Beorn Raukar.4328:

The reality is people do not miss dungeons at all, they miss the easy gold.

No, people want to feel adequately rewarded for what they do. The thing is though Anet killed dungeons psychologically more than anything else. The perception was immediately established after the nerf that nobody would be running dungeons any more and it has completely snowballed from there to become an unfortunate reality. I’m not convinced that increasing the rewards again will even have that much an effect because people will still have the perception that they are unrewarding, making finding groups difficult.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Dungeons are strung together with difficult-to-parse scripting and are very hard to diagnose when issues come up.

I think this is something many people are underestimating. The only difference between AC paths 1, 2, and 3 is the NPC that follows the player. So many Explorable Modes will progress their path from the NPC (Hodgins, Detha, etc.) crossing over triggers. For anyone who has ever done multiple paths in one run, you’ll come to the realization that the separation between each path is very, very brittle. I imagine in whatever tools or editors they use to build this content, it must be some kind of nightmare to see all these different paths and scripts overlapping one another and trying to make any sense of it.

Is there even anyone left at ArenaNet that originally built the dungeons still there? Without any experience with how they were originally created, I’d be afraid to touch anything in those places in case they end up breaking even more.

We actually still run into some issues with relics of old dungeon design in the Aetherblade and Molten Facility Fractals with how some of the progress of those places are still frustratingly tied to NPCs.

Simple fact: they are not happy with the dungeons. That’s why they fired the dungeon designer pretty short after release. They had metrics that showed how lackluster and primitive the design is. If you observe the mechanics from fractals, you note that the mechanics are less susceptible to simple DPS down. They encourage you to do some other things like remove stacks of shields or whatever. It is broken beyond repair and they know it. And since they lack the resources they just abandoned it. Also I think they nerfed the rewards for two reasons:

1.) incentivise to buy HOT
2.) with new sub-classes (specialisations) they become even more trivial and are done within minutes – the rewards for it from todays viewpoint are a bit out of place, so they removed a huge chunk from it

In my honest opinion I think it’s a bad move and it’s beyond reason to introduce a new expansion without any new 5man content. There are no dungeons which alone is rather questionnable but they dare to say that Fractals is their ‘new 5-man content’ for HOT and then they don’t even add any single new fractal?

Actually there is more mechanics in dungeons than fractals or raids.
Raids are very static, scripted and will be easier than dungeons.

If you look at CM P1 – there are 3 unique bosses with 3 unique sets of mechanics.
In fractals – its trash, trash mobs then boss.

Mechanics? Really? Let me see: the mechanic of stacking with the boss in a corner and dps it down with the combined effort of 5 zerker classes and some ice bows for most of dungeons life :p

As said before, they dont have a dungeon team anymore. It’s only guessing, but it is possible that at this point the original dungeon developer team is no longer working for ANet and it is too much time/resource drain to assign people to familiarize themselves with the dungeon source codes.

It is a common thing with complex software development, sadly. Even with codes that are properly documented, it takes a lot of time and effort to get people up to scratch to a legacy code even if there are people familiar with the code mentoring them. If they no longer have the original team, the cost/benefit ratio might be too big for the management to justify assigning resource to learn the old codes.

ProtoGunner.4953:

There are no dungeons which alone is rather questionnable but they dare to say that Fractals is their ‘new 5-man content’ for HOT and then they don’t even add any single new fractal?

Can definitely agree that its a huge shame that Arenanet shifted the playerbase away from dungeons and into fractals without any new fractals.

It should be noted that they are working on new fractals now and they have made a fair amount of QoL changes to fractals to allow for more accessibility to them.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Dungeons are strung together with difficult-to-parse scripting and are very hard to diagnose when issues come up. Fractals create an environment that’s much easier to simply drop in a new Fractal, whereas dungeons require massive amounts of terrain design and map locations, and require lots of very specific custom skins associated with them. In the case of Fractals, a lot of these things are much lower impact.

I’m not surprised ANet dropped dungeons, honestly. They were an unsustainable system.

This stuff’s really interesting, thankyou for your insight. I thought that there were some ‘interesting’ things going on with the backend of dungeons but I didn’t know much about how deep it goes.

Funny thing there are still pieces of dialog/NPCs inside fractals.
Dungeons > Fractals any day of the week.

The gating / instabilities/ repetitive nature of FOTM and oh mobs hit harder as you go up is meh. I prefer the dungeons and always have.

They abandoned dungeons way too early in the game as people will still getting to grips with open world and were not ready for them. Now people need them to learn there class and try things out – and they nerfed them to hell with the rewards resulting in many players quitting.

We have proven time and time again that unskilled farming methods such as mineral farming / Silverwastes chest farm has been netting more gold/HR for the last year compared to any skilled system: fractals, dungeons, raids.

ANET seem to want us doing unskilled mindless farming for our gold.

Yea…. I enjoyed dungeons. So don’t pretend nobody cares about them.

Have you not heard? It’s the Anet way to abandon things when things get difficult… Water Combat, WVW, dungeons, ect ect…

Because they gamble on hitting it big with their newest shiniest project instead of steadily improving and developing older content.

WoW made the same choices – abandon dungeons (we have X-WOW Developers here guys !) – to build RAIDS.

Then guess what … WoW Started to cut-back on RAIDS: They apologised to there dungeon community for neglecting them. Then WoW started building dungeons again with every release.

So its funny how things come full-circle.
I expect the same thing to happen here – its the circle of MMOs.

TPMN.1483:

Actually there is more mechanics in dungeons than fractals or raids.
Raids are very static, scripted and will be easier than dungeons.

If you look at CM P1 – there are 3 unique bosses with 3 unique sets of mechanics.
In fractals – its trash, trash mobs then boss.

Well that was a very good Joke.

After this laugh we can go to something serious again^^

TPMN.1483:

WoW made the same choices – abandon dungeons (we have X-WOW Developers here guys !) – to build RAIDS.

Then guess what … WoW Started to cut-back on RAIDS: They apologised to there dungeon community for neglecting them. Then WoW started building dungeons again with every release.

So its funny how things come full-circle.
I expect the same thing to happen here – its the circle of MMOs.

That’s untrue and a ludicrous simplification at the same time.

Which part is untrue?

Go check Legion – 9 dungeons introduced

TPMN.1483:

Which part is untrue?

Go check Legion – 9 dungeons introduced

Firstly, Blizzard did not abandon dungeons to build raids. Releases in WotLK and Cataclysm, when raiding’s emphasis was increased, especially with the addition of two new difficulty modes for raids, was at the same time as the release of several dungeons. Four post-launch dungeons were added in WotLK, and five post-launch dungeons were added in Cataclysm. The end of post-launch dungeons was MoP- far from the point when raiding was expanded. They stopped making dungeons because they believed that other forms of small group content, scenarios and Timeless Isle, were better.

Secondly, they have never stopped adding dungeons in the initial launch of the expansion. You say “go check legion” but they’re doing exactly what they’ve done in every single expansion; there is no reduction over time. There is no reason to believe that they will go back to adding post-launch dungeons in the way they did in Cata and WotLK.

You also say that Blizzard has cut back on raids when that’s untrue. They’ve been pushing raids very strongly and there is no reason that they would cut back on raiding content in the expansion.

They have made no change to their position. From Vanilla to current content, with every single expansion, they have raised the emphasis on raiding. Legion does not change this trend- At most, they are not producing more raid content than they already were.

“They stopped making dungeons because they believed that other forms of small group content, scenarios and Timeless Isle, were better.” — and they went back to making more dungeons. QED

TPMN.1483:

“They stopped making dungeons because they believed that other forms of small group content, scenarios and Timeless Isle, were better.” — and they went back to making more dungeons. QED

Dude that was the end of the expansion. They’ve always made new dungeons with the launch of new expansions.

I assumed you were familiar with the expansion cycle of WoW.

Can I ask what does WoW dungeons/raids has to do with GW2 dungeons being abandoned?

maddoctor.2738:

Can I ask what does WoW dungeons/raids has to do with GW2 dungeons being abandoned?

He thinks that there’s a cyclic pattern between raids being emphasized and in exchange dungeons being de-emphasized, which is untrue.

PyrateSilly.4710:

They did not “nerf” dungeons. All they did was slightly reduce the gold gotten. The rewards are still the same, the dungeons are the same.

On the other hand they do now have the new 10 man dungeon/raid available.

Friends that used to run dungeons with me now ask me why I run them with gold nerfed.

They barely ever do this content now.

They play raids even less.

We were flat out told that part of ANet’s goal was to discourage players from doing dungeons. At essentially the same time we were told that Raids and Fractals were intended to be the focus for instanced team content in GW2. Raids are gated by the expansion and rewards for fractals are partially gated by HoT.

I expect that a desire to drive sales of HoT was at least a point of consideration in the decision to finally/formally abandon dungeons.

Many Pesky Monk.3140:

Serious question. I just can’t seem to wrap my head around it. How is it that a company completely abandons such a huge chunk of it’s PvE content?

I’ve never seen another MMO do this before. Instead of reworking/fixing dungeons, they nerf it and just leave it broken, forcing players to do other things like fractals and raids.

Has Anet given a reason why they forever abandoned dungeons, or will they ever go back and fix them?

This type of “unknown”, the idea of leaving players hanging, asking questions, and not getting solid direct answers is why I made this post Bury your Dead

In the end, if Anet (For whatever reasons) pulled the plug on Dungeons, they should make this evidently clear to the public that they are a dead content.

Simply Nerfing the rewards to make them unappealing hoping that players will wander off and do other things, is a horrible way to handle cutting the funding on Dungeons in my Humble Opinion of things.

If they have opted to Abandon Dungeons, they should do the right thing, make an event, perhaps a Living World type event, that will go on for about a week, where each Explorer path of the dungeons, gets closed down, their respective NPC’s that lead the paths, return “home” either in victory or defeat.

And this players can be a part of the day that they closed the Explorer paths, as opposed to leaving the public wondering what gives with the Dungeons.