Guild Wars 2

Hey all, I’m kinda bummed about the dungeon gold nerf as me and my friends used to duo arah alot and sometimes sell the extra slots, But do you think dungeon selling was part of anets motivation to nerf the rewards? or is it something an economist would have to explain about the influx of gold entering the hands of players through grinding dungeons?

Me and my friends enjoyed arah alot, it was challenging and rewarding to duo or 3 man, Yet i find myself at a loss of things to do, because i’m not huge into running with the boss train zergs, and i’ve essentially grinded out everything i’ve needed as far as mastery points go in HoT. (to me) it was a depressing part of the update, although i do look forward to raiding. anyways, enough moaning, does anyone know what anet’s motivation was behind nerfing dungeons?

TLDR: dungeon rewards nerfed very sad.

ANET’s economist, John Smith, said that it was to de-incentivize dungeons. In other words, it was to make people not want to play dungeon content. Their dungeon team was disbanded long ago, and now they want people to focus on HoT content. I agree that it’s sad, by the way.

Guhracie.3419:

ANET’s economist, John Smith, said that it was to de-incentivize dungeons. In other words, it was to make people not want to play dungeon content. Their dungeon team was disbanded long ago, and now they want people to focus on HoT content. I agree that it’s sad, by the way.

With this information I can see why they would want to do it, but I think taking away from older content to make new content appealing is kinda backwards. The content itself should be profitable and appealing in its own sense to motivate people to want to play it. Not “well doing this sucks now, guess we gotta go do that”

Another thing to note too, I haven’t done alot of fractals since the update, But has the gold reduction been slapped there too?

This is making it incredibly difficult to work on Dungeoneer. It seems its easier/faster to farm in PvP to earn PvE tokens for a PvE title with PvE rewards. And yes. Fractal rewards suck too.

They wanted to do it without blowing out the economy, just making the new stuff worth more would just move the goalposts on the economy – dungeons were pretty crazy amounts of gold while farms are much more neutral.

Just run more dungeons..its still good money.

I can tell you guys this:

If Arenanet does not stop doing some of the things they are doing now, they will lose money. Don’t get me wrong, I love this game very very much. But the development+marketing teams really have no idea what they are doing. Since 2 years ago (and specially since HOT) this game has become a “Hey look at what we can come up with” show. Sad but true. This is not how you keep a business healthy…

(Sorry Arenanet if I was disrespectful again, you guys draw that conclusion quite fast.)

kornfanxxx.9143:

Another thing to note too, I haven’t done alot of fractals since the update, But has the gold reduction been slapped there too?

Well, definitely they didn’t move the rewards to fractals, like they said they did. And on average, the loot from encryption boxes is so bad it’s not worth buying keys for them.

emikochan.8504:

They wanted to do it without blowing out the economy

It had nothing to do with economy. They just wanted people to stop playing dungeons, because they themselves are not interested in maintaining those.
Also, it was most likely done in order to boost raid participation numbers once they are out. Seems they are afraid Raids won’t be as splendid a success as they’d have wanted without some “creative help” like that.

The amount of pure gold gain was ridiculous, it’s better for the economy to farm places like SW.

Astralporing.1957:

kornfanxxx.9143:

Another thing to note too, I haven’t done alot of fractals since the update, But has the gold reduction been slapped there too?

Well, definitely they didn’t move the rewards to fractals, like they said they did. And on average, the loot from encryption boxes is so bad it’s not worth buying keys for them.

This is true even if you have the Fractal Mastery. You’ll probably average 15s for every 20s spent with a 1g junk item once every blue moon.

You can sell the encryption boxes themselves for around 23s on the TP though.

P.S is it just me or dose anyone else think its wrong that Anet think its ok to nerff gold rewards as a way to MANIPULATE us to play there new content ?
all i heard in there statement is WE dont want players grinding dungeons
my responce to that is screw you Anet we are your customers this isnt about what YOU want its about what we want we pay your wages

Maybe this in-house economist is as much of an economist as an art critic is an artist.

wouw.5837:

The amount of pure gold gain was ridiculous, it’s better for the economy to farm places like SW.

The thing is…. running dungeons was fun, farming SW sucks.

Fractal rewards are garbage, rarely worth the cost of the key you have to buy to unlock the chests… in no uncertain terms we, the players, have been screwed for rewards on both dungeons and fractals.

They redid the way fractals worked, ruined the loot drops, ruined the reward for it and want people to do more of them… yet couldn’t add a single new fractal.

I have to say that’s pretty sad and insightful.

XYLUM.7286:

wouw.5837:

The amount of pure gold gain was ridiculous, it’s better for the economy to farm places like SW.

The thing is…. running dungeons was fun, farming SW sucks.

Fractal rewards are garbage, rarely worth the cost of the key you have to buy to unlock the chests… in no uncertain terms we, the players, have been screwed for rewards on both dungeons and fractals.

They redid the way fractals worked, ruined the loot drops, ruined the reward for it and want people to do more of them… yet couldn’t add a single new fractal.

I have to say that’s pretty sad and insightful.

If its fun then you should do it becouse of it not the reward.

People usually do things for 2 reasons:
Fun and reward.
Let’s give each of them 100 points at max. That makes 200 points in total.
For dungeons you have fun factor about 70, and reward about 90, so total 160 points.
For a SW chestrun you have 100 reward and 10 fun factor, total points of 110 points.
For pvp/wvw you have 90 fun factor and 40 reward, total of 130 points.

This is my personal rating. So obvious I would run dungeons, because it’s both rewarding and fun. And if I bought everything I wanted, I go for wvw/pvp for the fun factor and ok rewards.

They didnt even nerf the gold rewards properly. Should have upped item drops from the mobs/champs people skip, scaled the gold rewards based on length of dungeon, added more tokens, ANYTHING.

If all they were concerned about was the ‘gold’, there are far better ways to do this. That John Smith guy destroyed most of the repeatable content in this game. I fear for the longevity of this game once the newness of HoT wears off. Which is sad because dungeons/fractals being as old as they are were already wearing thin on so many people.

The fractal update is just as much a lie as the last one.
‘Hey guys, this is the fractal ldrbrd update, but we forgot to put in the ldrbrds’
now
‘Hey guys, this is the fractal reward update, but we forgot to put in the rewards’
really?
….actually update the fractal rewards like you promised or give us back our dungeon rewards. This one is worse because you charged us tons of money for it.

Kirnale.5914:

People usually do things for 2 reasons:
Fun and reward.
Let’s give each of them 100 points at max. That makes 200 points in total.
For dungeons you have fun factor about 70, and reward about 90, so total 160 points.
For a SW chestrun you have 100 reward and 10 fun factor, total points of 110 points.
For pvp/wvw you have 90 fun factor and 40 reward, total of 130 points.

This is my personal rating. So obvious I would run dungeons, because it’s both rewarding and fun. And if I bought everything I wanted, I go for wvw/pvp for the fun factor and ok rewards.

Thats not a bad way to put it.
I honestly enjoy them more too just because its a group I make with my friends and have more control over. Now its like.. ‘hey guys.. wouldnt it be fun if we got together and did some content thats way harder and less rewarding than anything else in the game?’

Cbomb.4310:

They didnt even nerf the gold rewards properly. Should have upped item drops from the mobs/champs people skip, scaled the gold rewards based on length of dungeon, added more tokens, ANYTHING.

If all they were concerned about was the ‘gold’, there are far better ways to do this. That John Smith guy destroyed most of the repeatable content in this game. I fear for the longevity of this game once the newness of HoT wears off. Which is sad because dungeons/fractals being as old as they are were already wearing thin on so many people.

The fractal update is just as much a lie as the last one.
‘Hey guys, this is the fractal ldrbrd update, but we forgot to put in the ldrbrds’
now
‘Hey guys, this is the fractal reward update, but we forgot to put in the rewards’
really?
….actually update the fractal rewards like you promised or give us back our dungeon rewards. This one is worse because you charged us tons of money for it.

I am not addressing any of the rest of your points, but I will say that John Smith was absolutely clear about the fact that it wasn’t an issue of the gold; he did outright state that it was to encourage people to move away from running dungeons.

I’m not expressing any of my personal opinions about that move, or about fractal rewards, or about the game in general, here. Just saying that they were quite clear about the primary reason for making this particular change.

John Smith, why? why has thou forsaken us

My prefered solution would have been to cut the base gold but give a bonus for “full-clear”-runs. So skipping your way through the dungeon gives less reward, than a group that kills every thrash mob.

I pity anyone who wants dungeon armor from here on out ….

Guhracie.3419:

Cbomb.4310:

They didnt even nerf the gold rewards properly. Should have upped item drops from the mobs/champs people skip, scaled the gold rewards based on length of dungeon, added more tokens, ANYTHING.

If all they were concerned about was the ‘gold’, there are far better ways to do this. That John Smith guy destroyed most of the repeatable content in this game. I fear for the longevity of this game once the newness of HoT wears off. Which is sad because dungeons/fractals being as old as they are were already wearing thin on so many people.

The fractal update is just as much a lie as the last one.
‘Hey guys, this is the fractal ldrbrd update, but we forgot to put in the ldrbrds’
now
‘Hey guys, this is the fractal reward update, but we forgot to put in the rewards’
really?
….actually update the fractal rewards like you promised or give us back our dungeon rewards. This one is worse because you charged us tons of money for it.

I am not addressing any of the rest of your points, but I will say that John Smith was absolutely clear about the fact that it wasn’t an issue of the gold; he did outright state that it was to encourage people to move away from running dungeons.

I’m not expressing any of my personal opinions about that move, or about fractal rewards, or about the game in general, here. Just saying that they were quite clear about the primary reason for making this particular change.

Ya, I know.
I also think its awful.
The fact that they did it so badly, if anything, just proves that ‘gold inflation’ wasnt even the reason.

He was asked if it was to discourage people from doing their dungeon content, he flat out said ‘yes’.

You can still do dungeons for the cosmetics and legendary stuff like it was intended in the first place.

Killua.8041:

You can still do dungeons for the cosmetics and legendary stuff like it was intended in the first place.

only if you can find a group which got that much harder now

Bye Guild Wars 2 and bye Arena Net. Poor you need to do such things that the players play the new content. Shows how bad the new content is.
#GW2willneverbeasgoodasGW1

Guhracie.3419:

I am not addressing any of the rest of your points, but I will say that John Smith was absolutely clear about the fact that it wasn’t an issue of the gold; he did outright state that it was to encourage people to move away from running dungeons.

Where is there a link to this?

And to the statement that the Dungeon team was disbanded?

Kichwas.7152:

Guhracie.3419:

I am not addressing any of the rest of your points, but I will say that John Smith was absolutely clear about the fact that it wasn’t an issue of the gold; he did outright state that it was to encourage people to move away from running dungeons.

Where is there a link to this?

And to the statement that the Dungeon team was disbanded?

The statement was actually years ago at this point. Its such common knowledge its not something you really need to cite anymore.

DayLeeKnight.6398:

Bye Guild Wars 2 and bye Arena Net. Poor you need to do such things that the players play the new content. Shows how bad the new content is.
#GW2willneverbeasgoodasGW1

I see it as #GW2HoTwillneverbeasgoodasGW2

Kichwas.7152:

Guhracie.3419:

I am not addressing any of the rest of your points, but I will say that John Smith was absolutely clear about the fact that it wasn’t an issue of the gold; he did outright state that it was to encourage people to move away from running dungeons.

Where is there a link to this?

And to the statement that the Dungeon team was disbanded?

The interview with John Smith is posted on Dulfy. The dungeon team was disbanded years ago, and given how slipshod ANET is about keeping track of their own news, I’m really not inclined to go digging for it. It might’ve been on reddit, twitter, in a thread on this very forum totally unrelated to dungeons, or a blog post. I have no idea.

What, exactly was so bad about dungeons that they decided on such drastic actions of disbanding the team responsible for them, stopping all work on them and in the end giving us the finger?
Was gold farming the only reason?

symke.3105:

What, exactly was so bad about dungeons that they decided on such drastic actions of disbanding the team responsible for them, stopping all work on them and in the end giving us the finger?
Was gold farming the only reason?

I think they had difficulty balancing them. Which I blame the down level system for. I don’t think the gold rewards had anything to do with it. After the first 2 or 3 times down a path in a day you weren’t getting anything worthwhile.

They had to make all but Arah so that they scaled with different levels and it just wasn’t working. If you went in too early you were going to have a really rough time. And at max level they were face roll easy.

So they probably decided to focus on content that didn’t scale which would allow them to keep things consistent.

That and they spread themselves too thin with all the living story crap.

fellyn.5083:

symke.3105:

What, exactly was so bad about dungeons that they decided on such drastic actions of disbanding the team responsible for them, stopping all work on them and in the end giving us the finger?
Was gold farming the only reason?

I think they had difficulty balancing them. Which I blame the down level system for. I don’t think the gold rewards had anything to do with it. After the first 2 or 3 times down a path in a day you weren’t getting anything worthwhile.

They had to make all but Arah so that they scaled with different levels and it just wasn’t working. If you went in too early you were going to have a really rough time. And at max level they were face roll easy.

So they probably decided to focus on content that didn’t scale which would allow them to keep things consistent.

That and they spread themselves too thin with all the living story crap.

I can understand them having problems with that. I think scaling is one the best features of GW2, but I can also see how much work it could require.
That said, completely stopping work on them is not a solution or anything like it. And a problem needs a solution, not sticking your head in sand.
I do hope they will re-evaluate their views on dungeons and what their role in the game is and continue working on them.
GW2 is a good game because it has so many different options to play.

I’m honestly surprised they didn’t go the hard mode route they did like in GW1. Of course I can see the cries of “anet copying blizz with hard mode” now if such a thing ever happened. Even though they had hard mode in GW1 well before it was ever in WoW.

Maybe they will in the future.

Here’s what I think happened with dungeons: I don’t think the team was disbanded due to gold creation or anything like that. I think that they were extremely disappointed with the response to the Aetherpath addition to Twilight Arbor and decided that it wasn’t worth the time/effort/money to build dungeons. But I have to say that Aetherpath is one of the best designs I’ve seen in guild wars, as far as dungeons/bosses go, but it simply isn’t rewarding enough for the amount of time it takes.

One major flaw ANET has is with their reward system, and dungeons showed this flaw early. All dungeons and their paths were not created equal, and yet they all gave the same rewards. Interesting design is great, but it’s not enough. If I’m getting the same things in Aetherpath as I can get in a 10-minute CoF run, the choice is simple.

I think a lot of us work with limited time to play the game, so managing that time for both fun and reward is pretty important to a lot of players. But I think all ANET saw was that Aetherpath didn’t have great numbers, and had loads of complaints.

Personally, I find it a bit disturbing that, instead of using solid design and incentives in Heart of Thorns, they’ve chosen to remove rewards in older content. But I don’t find it surprising.

Guhracie.3419:

Here’s what I think happened with dungeons: I don’t think the team was disbanded due to gold creation or anything like that. I think that they were extremely disappointed with the response to the Aetherpath addition to Twilight Arbor and decided that it wasn’t worth the time/effort/money to build dungeons. But I have to say that Aetherpath is one of the best designs I’ve seen in guild wars, as far as dungeons/bosses go, but it simply isn’t rewarding enough for the amount of time it takes.

One major flaw ANET has is with their reward system, and dungeons showed this flaw early. All dungeons and their paths were not created equal, and yet they all gave the same rewards. Interesting design is great, but it’s not enough. If I’m getting the same things in Aetherpath as I can get in a 10-minute CoF run, the choice is simple.

I think a lot of us work with limited time to play the game, so managing that time for both fun and reward is pretty important to a lot of players. But I think all ANET saw was that Aetherpath didn’t have great numbers, and had loads of complaints.

Personally, I find it a bit disturbing that, instead of using solid design and incentives in Heart of Thorns, they’ve chosen to remove rewards in older content. But I don’t find it surprising.

You make some good points there. I tried that dungeon path when it was brand new and never made it past the first boss because people refused to actually try to figure out how to beat them. There was no spot to stack and cheese the boss, etc, and haven’t bothered to go back since.

But I honestly doubt that was one of the causes for them not continuing with dungeons. People have kittened about living story and how bad it was from the get-go and especially when Scarlet showed up yet they still stuck with that.

They can’t do away with them because they are involved in the personal story. Which is another reason why it’s odd they’re trying to move away from them.

symke.3105:

What, exactly was so bad about dungeons that they decided on such drastic actions of disbanding the team responsible for them, stopping all work on them and in the end giving us the finger?
Was gold farming the only reason?

There’s a bunch of reasons why, besides scaling back post-launch on GW2.

• Players trivialised dungeons with various tactics, highlighting weak points intrinsic to almost all dungeon design
• ANet would not commit to re-designing dungeons to deal with this, or include a hard mode. Instead they:
• Launched fractals, which are built with lessons learned from dungeons and were supposed to be better supported (but haven’t seen anywhere near the focus they need). Fractals are a “screw it, let’s start again” approach to dungeons/instanced co-op PvE play.

Was it only 18 months or so ago (perhaps less) that dungeon rewards were improved? They used to have rewards much like they are now. ANet believed this was insufficient, despite their problems.

I believe what I see not what people tell me I should. The stated reason for nerfing dungeon gold was to move people to ’different areas’. If that was true then the ’different areas’ would have a corresponding increase in gold rewards. After all, this isn’t about stopping new gold from entering the game.

What I see is no additional gold rewards from ’different areas’ for a similar time input and a new game mechanism that is best capped in the very dungeons we’re supposed to be moved away from. At a time when far more people will suddenly be running dungeons ANet nerf the gold reward.

What I see is this is all about stopping new gold from entering the game and nothing else. I’m not saying if that’s good or bad, I’m just saying ANet, please stop trying to mislead us.

Well it is sad but at the same time you have to admit that dungeon content in this game was kind of a joke. I mean they took no effort, could be glitched through/solod andgave an absolutely ridiculous amount of gold, enough to cause massive inflation.

Whatevs, not fussed.

Honestly I never liked dungeons, open world content is much more fun.

Spirited Was Eceni.3869:

I believe what I see not what people tell me I should. The stated reason for nerfing dungeon gold was to move people to ‘different areas’. If that was true then the ‘different areas’ would have a corresponding increase in gold rewards. After all, this isn’t about stopping new gold from entering the game.

What I see is no additional gold rewards from ‘different areas’ for a similar time input and a new game mechanism that is best capped in the very dungeons we’re supposed to be moved away from. At a time when far more people will suddenly be running dungeons ANet nerf the gold reward.

What I see is this is all about stopping new gold from entering the game and nothing else. I’m not saying if that’s good or bad, I’m just saying ANet, please stop trying to mislead us.

You assume ANet actually foresaw people using one specific part of a dungeon as a massive exp grind for masteries. They most likely didn’t.

The fact that they haven’t nerfed it into the ground yet shows how little they actually care about old content though. Which is disappointing at best and completely mind blowing (and not in a good way) at worst.

fellyn.5083:

Spirited Was Eceni.3869:

I believe what I see not what people tell me I should. The stated reason for nerfing dungeon gold was to move people to ‘different areas’. If that was true then the ‘different areas’ would have a corresponding increase in gold rewards. After all, this isn’t about stopping new gold from entering the game.

What I see is no additional gold rewards from ‘different areas’ for a similar time input and a new game mechanism that is best capped in the very dungeons we’re supposed to be moved away from. At a time when far more people will suddenly be running dungeons ANet nerf the gold reward.

What I see is this is all about stopping new gold from entering the game and nothing else. I’m not saying if that’s good or bad, I’m just saying ANet, please stop trying to mislead us.

You assume ANet actually foresaw people using one specific part of a dungeon as a massive exp grind for masteries. They most likely didn’t.

The fact that they haven’t nerfed it into the ground yet shows how little they actually care about old content though. Which is disappointing at best and completely mind blowing (and not in a good way) at worst.

I certainly assume ANet foresaw people using dungeons to xp grind. A little consideration of other grind runs still in the game, or nerfed out of existence, will tell even the newest ANet employee that xp grinding would happen the moment Tyria masteries went live. I admit they may have struggled to say which dungeon would be used but to suggest they didn’t foresee it is to assume ANet is nieve. It’s a given fact that some people will always look for the shortest route to achieve a goal.

Need a lot of xp quickly? What will give a lot of xp in the shortest time and least effort? Those questions had to have been asked and answered at some point during development. I’d even go further and suggest this is also the reason why we don’t have raids yet, assuming raids will give HoT masteries xp.

Cbomb.4310:

Kichwas.7152:

Where is there a link … to the statement that the Dungeon team was disbanded?

The statement was actually years ago at this point. Its such common knowledge its not something you really need to cite anymore.

Except I am now asking for a cite, because in this game that is only about 2 and a half years old, not “years”, I missed that one. I was not around for the second half of season 1 of living story through to most of season 2…

I recall them actually amping up the dungeon team midway through season 1 of Living Story – the molten dungeon and the karka dungeon and the aetherblade dungeon for example.

So I’d love to see where they actually said this.

Just because you presume something is known, does not excuse making a grand statement without backing it up.

fellyn.5083:

I think they had difficulty balancing them. Which I blame the down level system for. I don’t think the gold rewards had anything to do with it. After the first 2 or 3 times down a path in a day you weren’t getting anything worthwhile.

They had to make all but Arah so that they scaled with different levels and it just wasn’t working. If you went in too early you were going to have a really rough time. And at max level they were face roll easy.

FFXIV and Wildstar both downscale effectively. And City of Heroes figured out scaling both up and down a decade ago (though CoH dungeons broke for another reason – they added vertical progression in a few years later and then waited another 2-3 years to go back and retune the content for it…).

So downscaling is not a new thing. I don’t think it broke GW2 dungeons – they actually downscale fairly decently.

fellyn.5083:

That and they spread themselves too thin with all the living story crap.

This I can agree on. The story writing of that stuff started to get really thin as its pace shot up, and then they backed off to the seasons idea… all other MMOs with similar plans to have super fast paced content drops backed off and decided not to go down that rabbit hole.

I figured they did this because they were moving rewards to fractals and raids. Can’t say much for raids, seeing as how they aren’t in the game atm, but fractal rewards still suck. It makes me concerned that raid rewards won’t make up for it.

Kichwas.7152:

Cbomb.4310:

Kichwas.7152:

Where is there a link … to the statement that the Dungeon team was disbanded?

The statement was actually years ago at this point. Its such common knowledge its not something you really need to cite anymore.

Except I am now asking for a cite, because in this game that is only about 2 and a half years old, not “years”, I missed that one. I was not around for the second half of season 1 of living story through to most of season 2…

I recall them actually amping up the dungeon team midway through season 1 of Living Story – the molten dungeon and the karka dungeon and the aetherblade dungeon for example.

So I’d love to see where they actually said this.

Just because you presume something is known, does not excuse making a grand statement without backing it up.

Well, I’d love for ANET to have a centralized news archive, so I guess we’re both going to be disappointed. Truthfully, I don’t care if you believe the dungeon team was disbanded or not. It really doesn’t matter to me, because I remember it, and I don’t seem to be the only one.

The molten dungeon and the rest that you mentioned are not at all the same as the dungeon content that’s being discussed in this thread. Those were one-shot minidungeons that had one (often very short) path, and usually did not require a full party. They did not have an associated set of armor/weapons/currency/vendor. They did not adhere to the way dungeons are structured in GW2.

Spirigo.2897:

Well it is sad but at the same time you have to admit that dungeon content in this game was kind of a joke. I mean they took no effort, could be glitched through/solod andgave an absolutely ridiculous amount of gold, enough to cause massive inflation.

Whatevs, not fussed.

Honestly I never liked dungeons, open world content is much more fun.

So are fractals and with the HoT expansion it is even easier now. On top of that fractals don’t even take any effort, even more so that HoT is out.

A bunch of things in the game can be glitched and people have used that for gains beyond dungeons, not sure what your point is unless you are saying stacking = glitch. Also, a person who solos are dungeon is putting more effort in learning the mechanics and maximizing what they do so they should be rewarded for it.

Dungeon rewards aren’t the problem since they nerf the rewards to discourage people doing dungeons (see official post on the main site).

Open world content is not fun and has no challenges on top of the fact that it can be frustrating since you are paired up with people who won’t listen/won’t work as a team. I rather have more group content (dungeons, fractals, raids) where I a pair up with people I know I can work together with to succeed.

Google is your friend about dungeon director being laid off answered on last page by a red post.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Robert-Hrouda-has-left-Arenanet/first

And answer about dungeon/ fractals
https://youtu.be/umpR6LhBhW4?t=258

forum bug squish it.