Okay, here is a brief summary of my idea to take the basic setup of the Gauntlet, and turn it into a permanent gold sink:
1) Move it out of the Pavillion. Possibly to several locations across the world where there is a lot of space.
2) Have large, medium and small fighting arenas.
3) Charge gold for entry. My thinking is something like 10 silver per fight, and another 10 per gambit.
4) Introduce new bosses. These could be entirely new, but more practically, simply bring in champs and dungeon bosses. Don’t change the mechanics on these, soloing Lupi is already a thing, might as well make gold from people doing it.
5) On the note of soloing, it isn’t necessary. Allow parties into the bigger arenas, and divide the rewards and drop chances among the players.
Now, where this gets complicated is in the rewards. This shouldn’t be a farm that brings in people who aren’t actually doing it for fun. That’d get old quickly, and it’d need to be nerfed. So, my suggestion is to design the rewards like fractals:
1) Every fight, and every gambit, earns you some amount of tokens. Obviously the amount of tokens needs to be balanced for boss difficulty, and the tokens need to be limited as the fights would be over quickly. These tokens can be exchanged for similar rewards to Fractal tokens. If there is fear of farming, limit each specific boss to once a day.
2) Include a SMALL chance of getting an RNG weapon skin from a fight. These skins shouldn’t be exceptional, but like mistforged, SAB, and fractal skins, should be a kind of badge of honour. Possibly even include a different coloured version available for tokens.
3) Also include a small chance of getting account bound Ascended gear, as in Fractals.
4) Achievement based skins/minis would also of course be awesome, and reward the best players.
The exact numbers here I’m not sure of. But this would allow for permanent, rewarding, and difficult content to be introduced to the game with next to no new resources needed. New bosses could be added whenever, and there could even be tiers and leaderboards depending on where you wanted to take it. It also serves as a gold sink, and seems to fit in with the reward philosophy of other areas of the game.
There are probably huge issues with this, but I thought I’d put it out there as a starting point for people to tear apart and improve