Guild Wars 2

Hello,

I don’t normally come to the forums to discuss serious topics, because honestly most serious discussion get trolled / flamed into a big argument. However, this issue has grown into an uncontrollable phenomena that I cannot seem to avoid.

Dungeon Exploits…

I’ve been playing this game since beta and am only now noticing how rampant the ‘accepted’ norm of running dungeon exploits are in PuGs (pick up groups). Now, I can understand why exploits are attractive:

• They make life easier for the entire group on difficult fights
• They make the group go faster! More Efficient!
• People have been participating in these exploits since the beginning of the game, why complain now?

But what many players are totally not realizing is the fact that exploits are making you a bad player in the long run.

Players become so used to standing in one spot without danger from the boss and winning. They’re not developing the skills as intended for the dungeon by actually participating in the fights. So when they do have to actually fight the boss, it ends in a very ugly fashion, because the player does not have / has lost the skills to defeat the boss.

Not only do exploits lower a player’s skill, they also make dungeons go much faster than intended.

What a second, isn’t that a good thing? I don’t have a lot of time to play. I want to get in and get out as soon as possible!

But the entire rest of the game is catered to that playstyle, dungeons aren’t meant to be completed in such a way because they’re the culmination of your skill as a player at the intended level. They’re so supposed to take time and effort. The result is the last point I’d like to bring up.

Exploits ruin the game.

How many times have you seen players say, “I wanted to get this armor set two weeks ago and now I have every piece, I’m bored now, I want challenging content, there’s no endgame..” etc… well perhaps if exploits weren’t the norm in dungeons it would take a little longer than two weeks to get the equipment? Thus extending, even at a minimal margin, the life of the game.

I understand this is a very subjective matter, and I could be wrong due to my point of view, but if we continue to accept exploits, bugging bosses, and participating in runs that undermine the whole point of dungeons, we’ll never be satisfied as a community of players.

I’m not asking for people to go on strikes in parties, maybe just take a second to think of how you’re impacting your own game when you accept exploitative parties.

And just an additional point…

I often hear players complain how easy this game is. Exploits also undermine the difficulty of the game. If players want challenging content, then why are exploitative parties the norm? Do people think they want challenging content but really want to stand in one spot and auto-attack a boss?

Just some food for thought I guess.

Must have done AC or CM with the boss and golems.

While this happens in all MMOs, GW2 exacerbates the situation with it’s game play mechanics. Since survival has almost nothing to do with how you build your character, and everything to do with how you play your character (meaning it is entirely on the player) you can, and indeed should, build for maximum DPS. There really is no reason not to since there is no trinity. This leads to cutting corners elsewhere and you end up with exactly what you are talking about here.

It’s how the game is built and, sadly, it will always be this way in GW2.

Exploits are used because:

- Mobs give kittenty rewards to the point its not even worth killing them
- Mobs have a bazillion hitpoints and tedius mechanics
- Instances that are designed just to take time and toy with the patience of the player rather than be fun (harpy fractal prime design example, or swamp).
- Oh and did I forget to mention that mobs dont have any loot worth killing them for?

Make instances fun and worth it and you’ll see the level of exploits drop considerably. Skip all the mobs up to Lupicus by exploiting the left path you say? Give each of them a very high chance to drop 1-3 T6 dusts and you’ll have a whole community foaming at the mouth.

Phaedryn.3698:

While this happens in all MMOs, GW2 exacerbates the situation with it’s game play mechanics. Since survival has almost nothing to do with how you build your character, and everything to do with how you play your character (meaning it is entirely on the player) you can, and indeed should, build for maximum DPS. There really is no reason not to since there is no trinity. This leads to cutting corners elsewhere and you end up with exactly what you are talking about here.

It’s how the game is built and, sadly, it will always be this way in GW2.

Thank you for your response, and it’s always good to hear a different perspective; however, I disagree with the DPS point being the sole reason for exploitative parties becoming the accepted standard.

Not to say you’re wrong and I’m right, that’s just not what I see is the problem that leads to parties wanting to participate in exploits.

Personally, I think the ugly truth is, players in GW2 claim they want challenging content, but really they want the easiest possible way to obtain whatever goals they’ve accepted.

Inherently, the system GW2 has set up really leaves players (imo) quite confused as to what the goal is in playing the game. Is the goal to get a legendary? To get as much gold as possible? To get the best equipment? To be a good player?

The issue could also be a subjective one, as I said previously, since different people have different goals. The system in obtaining the interested goal, however, to me is very obvious.

To obtain whichever goal you want, you have to put in the hard work for it. Yet, players don’t seem to want to put in that hard work considering how acceptable exploits are in the average dungeon run.

Honestly, this problem has many deep issues that I don’t think I could root. I do want to bring this ugly occurrence up to the community, since our actions and considerations determine the overall accepted behavior in the present and future state of GW2.

Dawdler.8521:

Exploits are used because:

- Mobs give kittenty rewards to the point its not even worth killing them
- Mobs have a bazillion hitpoints and tedius mechanics
- Instances that are designed just to take time and toy with the patience of the player rather than be fun (harpy fractal prime design example, or swamp).
- Oh and did I forget to mention that mobs dont have any loot worth killing them for?

Make instances fun and worth it and you’ll see the level of exploits drop considerably. Skip all the mobs up to Lupicus by exploiting the left path you say? Give each of them a very high chance to drop 1-3 T6 dusts and you’ll have a whole community foaming at the mouth.

Hello and thanks for this response. Perhaps the rewards are an additional issue for parties to accept exploits. I remember way back when they added the whole DR system, I did notice exploits being used more often.

I must contest with this being the continual issue today. Many new players never experienced this game before the DR, so those crappy rewards shouldn’t even be a huge issue to them. Yet, exploits are becoming more and more accepted.

A really great point to consider, thanks again.

I just really want to point out to the OP that you are concentrating 100 % on the effect and not the cause. I sincerely believe it is the fact that many of the bosses have outragious HP , some of the mechanics are ok some are bland but the fact they have so much HP will drive people to take the easiest route. Sure i agree it will make you a worse player in the long run but you have to relise its human nature to find the path of least resistance and atm that exploits. if it were the same mechanics with alot less tedious HP then you’d find alot less people exploiting due to it being harder to find exploits than do the boss itself – again path of least resistance.
I understand you’re frustrations but i think your venting it in the wrong direction , it is infact Anet that has made these dungeons and their bosses , you’re really going against the grain if you think people are going to stop doing this for moral reasons.
the problem needs to be fixed at the cause. (HP bars > Mechanics)

PS , for all that is good in the world please stop refering to exploits and skipping mobs in the same sentance they are completely and utterly different. its like saying finding 5 dollars on the ground outside your front door is stealing

TheUndefined.1720:

And just an additional point…

I often hear players complain how easy this game is. Exploits also undermine the difficulty of the game. If players want challenging content, then why are exploitative parties the norm? Do people think they want challenging content but really want to stand in one spot and auto-attack a boss?

Just some food for thought I guess.

My group and I all feel that the game is too easy. The first time we completed every dungeon, we went through every single one of them without wipes. (The exception being Arah on Lupicus, and on Simin.) Lupicus was due to not knowing the mechanics, but the second time after we learned them, we one-shot him. Simin was due to bad implementation of mechanics.

Now that we’ve done the dungeons, we don’t really go back to any of them. The rewards are just too lacking. But that’s for another time. If we were going to do CoF P1, we would definitely just skip the trash. If we were going to do Arah, we would definitely abuse the terrain. And it isn’t because we are abusers of the game. It’s because the mechanics that are currently in the game are incredibly dull. There is nothing engaging about almost any of the dungeon encounters. A large majority of them can be completed by auto-attacking and avoiding red circles. It’s boring.

People are looking for ways to make the encounters go faster because they are not interesting. Most of them have way too much health for what the boss does. If there were more bosses with phases that actually matter and require you to pay attention, I am positive more people would do the boss properly. Yes, there would be those looking for more exploits, but I’m convinced that most people would simply be happy that there are finally fights in the game that are enjoyable.

Thanks for your response Booler!

That’s a really well thought out response, and I agree with you.

Yet, I feel like players continue to ignore the effects I brought up. People are aghast when I’ve seen members say, no exploits please, or, no bugging the boss. I know I’ve been ran out of groups and yelled at over making the suggestion myself.

ANet may be at fault, but we cannot control ANet. They’re going to make the decisions they want to make.

We can control how we play and how we treat each other.

Personally I feel players have taken a dark route in this situation. If you hate the way a dungeon is done, don’t run it. Show ANet that you don’t accept their choice. Offer constructive suggestions. Possibly, try to conform to ANet’s dungeon, despite how tedious and frustrating and become so good at those frustrating fights, they become a piece of cake.

I understand I’m fussing at human nature, and I apologize for that. I just hate seeing the bar so low in groups. Honestly, I cannot remember participating in exploits in WoW (Vanilla, BC, or WotLK), FFXI (Rise of Zilart, Promy, or Wings), LotRO (Isen, and that other expansion I cannot remember.. I’m sorry.. >.>)… here’s the kicker, not even FFXIV – and let me tell you… those fights were horrible.

I really believe in the gaming community of GW2, I just wish the community believed in itself more often and played with the integrity I know we all have.

Thank you so much for your post, Aliettefaye.

I apologize for sounding like I’m generalizing the entire community. I can become very short sighted when it comes to my own personal experiences and applying them to the vast majority of what I’ve seen / heard.

Thank you for offering a different perspective as well. Perhaps the fights themselves are a huge issue, like so many have brought up in this thread.

Booler.6598:

PS , for all that is good in the world please stop refering to exploits and skipping mobs in the same sentance they are completely and utterly different. its like saying finding 5 dollars on the ground outside your front door is stealing

I haven’t mentioned running past mobs as an exploit, if I did I apologize.

If Anet intended us to kill the mobs, then skipping the mobs is exploiting. You are seriously not going to tell me that they placed all those mobs in Arah for the sole purpose of finding some way to avoid them…

TheUndefined.1720:

But what many players are totally not realizing is the fact that exploits are making you a bad player in the long run.

I don’t think most people care.

Think about it. MMO players are those guys who made “kill ten rats” quests so popular. They are not concerned about being skilled. They are not concerned about having fun. They want to farm and grind (and exploit, since it’s almost the same thing).

That’s the main issue. ArenaNet could make a dungeon that were fun, but unless people could farm it, they wouldn’t play there. At the same time, ArenaNet can make a dungeon that is not fun, but if it has a big enough reward people will farm it 24 hours per day.

This is the crux of the issue. A farmer wants to play through a dungeon as fast as possible because he doesn’t want to play through that dungeon – he wants the reward he gets for it, the dungeon itself is just a required step to be rid of as soon as possible. Hence all the elitism, all the profession discrimination (demanding warriors in berseker gear only happens because no one is trying to have fun in those dungeons, just get done with them as soon as possible), the demands for a /inspect feature, and so on. Exploiters are just one small step ahead on the same scale – they also don’t have fun, they also want to go through those dungeons as quick as possible, and they also are doing everything they can, even if it’s detrimental to the game, to get the reward they want. If farmers abuse other players, exploiters abuse the game, but in the end it’s almost the same thing.

So no, your claims about exploiting making people worse players are not going to be heard. Farmers and exploiters don’t care about skill, or fun, or anything like that. All they care about is the reward; and the only way to prevent them from farming/exploiting is to nerf the farming, or nerf the reward itself.

Dawdler.8521:

If Anet intended us to kill the mobs, then skipping the mobs is exploiting. You are seriously not going to tell me that they placed all those mobs in Arah for the sole purpose of finding some way to avoid them…

Actually, if you look at Arah, it most definitely appears as if it was designed to skip, but at the same time designed to make skipping semi-challenging. The deadeyes and technicians in p2 that one-shot or perma-stun you, but are scarce in number seem like a “you can try to skip, but don’t kitten up, cause you’ll be dead” kind of mechanic.

Also, the bosses are so far in between with so much trash in there that I’m pretty sure they didn’t intend for us to fight all that crap. The entire dungeon screams ’skip me, skip me!".

As for exploits, like standing on the platform with the destroyer in SE p3, they don’t make runs faster, they make runs slower. A lot slower. You can akitten autoattack him from the platform, and the fight will take 3-4 minutes. Or you can melee DPS him on the ground, and the fight will take 30-40 seconds.

Most of the boss ‘exploits’ actually make you go slower.

@ undefined firstly it wasn’t you who mentioned skipping mobs =]

@ Dwadler , i agree with the above post , you raise a valid point but it still does not make skipping an “exploit” if i would pick your argument to bits i would say that on the flip side if they fully intended us to kill everymob they would make the aggro range larger than the environment and the leash range infinite, because they havn’t done this it is your choice to skip the mob or fight . if it is a choice it is not an exploit if you could find a way to glitch my above mentioned changes through clear glitching etc it would be an exploit, but in all cases it is not.
guild wars 1 is very old and from its begining people skipped mobs and it was accepted and used as a tactic from that day onwards , they have followed a similar trend in gw2.

to the OP i think the best bet for this is creating your own group clearly stating you do not wish to use an exploits and if suggested you will be kicked / or have you and your guild/friends who are on the same page do the runs.I understand this is not ideal at all and it shouldn’t have to be that way but it is about the only reliable way to get groups whom will see things as you do.

Booler.6598:

to the OP i think the best bet for this is creating your own group clearly stating you do not wish to use an exploits and if suggested you will be kicked / or have you and your guild/friends who are on the same page do the runs.I understand this is not ideal at all and it shouldn’t have to be that way but it is about the only reliable way to get groups whom will see things as you do.

Thanks for the response. I apologize if this sounds rude, it isn’t my intention. I really don’t want to make this situation personal to my own situations, but more so to raise awareness of this rampant acceptance of exploitative parties in general.

However… I do the exact suggestions you offer. I post no exploits, we don’t exploit, we wipe because the party does not have the skill to fight the bosses as intended.

Also, it’s impossible to run parties for me with only a specific group. I have to rely on the community.

So, the result is.. me coming on the forums and trying to raise awareness. lol.

I honestly cherish any LFG ad that wants to do everything in the dungeon, as long as I have the time to invest in it. Playing the game as intended is way more fun to me than just going on a reward-frenzy.

That said, it is up to ANet to kill every exploit that’s reported to them. CM used to be utterly exploitable, but they fixed some things. Hopefully they fix/redo the most problematic Dungeons regarding this in due time.

Exploiting is “play your way” gone mad… sad thing is that when they are taken away, the exploiters will claim that ANet is not letting them “play the way they want”, sadly enough (rewards, ASAP, and by any means possible.)

(No offense to those who like to play just for the rewards, but understand that not everybody needs such incentives to play and/or have fun, even if that would be unfathomable to you. Proper rewards ARE nice and welcome, but not the only reason I personally play.)

Erasculio.2914:

TheUndefined.1720:

But what many players are totally not realizing is the fact that exploits are making you a bad player in the long run.

I don’t think most people care.

Think about it. MMO players are those guys who made “kill ten rats” quests so popular. They are not concerned about being skilled. They are not concerned about having fun. They want to farm and grind (and exploit, since it’s almost the same thing) . . .

I totally agree with you, and thanks for your post.

Yet, I’m not directing my post to those types of players.

I understand farmers / exploiters are going to do what they want to do despite anything I say. I also understand a farmer / exploiter’s primary concern is themself. They don’t care how much they harm the game in the long run so long as they get their loot. That’s how they want to play, I’m not going to contest them.

I’m directing my post to those that simply go along with it. The quiet players that follow without hesitation. The players that may have standards in other games like WoW, but as soon as they log into gw2 those standards are adjusted accordingly.

Now I’m not asking for players to start a ruckus or yell at their party members for not having better standards. I am asking players to be aware of their actions and how it is affecting the game overall.

I know we have an amazing community here, and if we all demanded a little bit more from ourselves in game, it would reflect into a much brighter future for the game.

I get this is a lot to ask. Being an individual is against human nature, because back in the day individuals were the first ones eaten.

Still, I just want to raise this awareness and hopefully offer something to think about while playing GW2 instead of gold, legendaries, precursors, and dungeon tokens.

Dawdler.8521:

Exploits are used because:

- Mobs give kittenty rewards to the point its not even worth killing them
- Mobs have a bazillion hitpoints and tedius mechanics
- Instances that are designed just to take time and toy with the patience of the player rather than be fun (harpy fractal prime design example, or swamp).
- Oh and did I forget to mention that mobs dont have any loot worth killing them for?

Make instances fun and worth it and you’ll see the level of exploits drop considerably. Skip all the mobs up to Lupicus by exploiting the left path you say? Give each of them a very high chance to drop 1-3 T6 dusts and you’ll have a whole community foaming at the mouth.

I have to agree with this, dungeons are way to painful and tedious not to exploit them, if they made the above worth doing people would exploit these things a lot less..

Honestly why fight through terrible stuff for a good chance at nothing when its easy to just dodge the lot or exploit in safety…also after playing a few new mmo’s dungeons its made me realize how bad GW2 versions really are!

Dungeons take too much time for me. This game lacks little stuff to do. Most dungeons, to me, seem to take too much time & you need to repeat them many times. I play another game now, it has dungeons that take like 30 minutes & it has dungeons that need only two people and a system matches you automatically.

Now about exploits, this game is out how long now? It still has real exploits in the dungeons? Or are we talking about skipping some none-boss mobs?

I almost never use a dungeon exploit, the exception being CoF path 1 which I ceased considering a dungeon a long time ago. I don’t generally like to run by mobs. I don’t generally like to skip content by jumping around/up/over things. I like to play the game as it was designed.

Because I don’t play or do dungeons for reward (except maybe finishing a path for the dungeon master title), I don’t worry about killing something that might not be rewarding.

I wouldn’t mind seeing a vanquisher title which you could only get by killing EVERYTHING in a dungeon. That might get some people playing the game as intended.

TheUndefined.1720:

I often hear players complain how easy this game is. Exploits also undermine the difficulty of the game. If players want challenging content, then why are exploitative parties the norm? Do people think they want challenging content but really want to stand in one spot and auto-attack a boss?

There’s an awful lot of players. Even if exploiting is the norm, that leaves a lot of room for other players to want harder content. Also, players may want harder content and still use shortcuts in dungeons because they believe the dungeon is tedious rather than hard.

Many of the dungeons in this game are simply too long, there are too many trash packs and mobs have too many hps.

Sounds like you need to do some pvp

If only people would ensure they can do it without exploits.

When you are doing Cliffside at level 48 you really don’t want to hear people say “I have never done this properly”. And then proceed to wipe multiple times.

Wethospu.6437:

If only people would ensure they can do it without exploits.

When you are doing Cliffside at level 48 you really don’t want to hear people say “I have never done this properly”. And then proceed to wipe multiple times.

This.                    

kokiman.2364:

Wethospu.6437:

If only people would ensure they can do it without exploits.

When you are doing Cliffside at level 48 you really don’t want to hear people say “I have never done this properly”. And then proceed to wipe multiple times.

This.                    

And here’s the catch 22: to get good at a fight, sometimes players need to wipe multiple times until they get it right.

Skipping mob is not exploiting. Skipping mob:
1. You take more risk. Reward:
2. You can clear the dungeon faster
3. or You can clear the dungeon slower.

Exploiting or cheap tactics annoy me to the extent that if I’m not with 2 other guildies I won’t even bother joining a PuG for any dungeons.

It’s not that I like to play fair, it’s that I like to do things efficiently. And doing an exploit with a PuG won’t be smooth : some members won’t know the exploit, some won’t want to do it, taking away more time than if it had been done normally.

Then there are those cheap tactics/exploits against bosses…Just melee the boss instead of shooting your puny arrows. It’s like with Frost…just run around him in melee range, it’s way easier than trying to run around him from afar. Oh that’s right, PuGs tend to range him on the boulder.
“But I’ll die if I try to melee” well we all died when we started playing, but some of us learned the mechanics, dodge and use the necessary skills for surviving while killing the boss. And when players exploit, they learn nothing at all. Or worse, some warriors think that a riffle is a good choice every time, no matter what his team is fighting.

Dungeons can be incredibly easy and smooth. But some PuGs that got bored of bashing their head against a monster/boss like idiots, decided that exploiting was the only reasonable solution, making those incredibly easy dungeons a pain to do.

However skipping mobs isn’t an exploit. If Anet wants us to kill every monsters, they would be clear about it.

TheUndefined.1720:

kokiman.2364:

Wethospu.6437:

If only people would ensure they can do it without exploits.

When you are doing Cliffside at level 48 you really don’t want to hear people say “I have never done this properly”. And then proceed to wipe multiple times.

This.                    

And here’s the catch 22: to get good at a fight, sometimes players need to wipe multiple times until they get it right.

But you do not do that at the given example of fractals 48.

So many people were never taught how to do certain content without exploiting that when forced for whatever reason they simply can’t. That’s my biggest issue with exploiting. Exploiters effectively lower the average skill level of the community. Practise makes perfect, but practise also keeps your skill level at — its peak.

stupid filter there is a space between at and its

beren.6048:

Dungeo
Now about exploits, this game is out how long now? It still has real exploits in the dungeons? Or are we talking about skipping some none-boss mobs?

Most got fixed. I still know a couple, but some of them like skipping into path 3 from CoE is too risky for too little reward really.

Most exploits now are really minor things like standing on certain safespots and wail at a boss or stuff like that. Stuff like skipping straight to the endboss of a path got fixed in all of the dungeons I think. They all got sequencing now, meaning that if you don’t complete everything in the path, the boss won’t spawn/won’t give a reward.

I don’t like skipping mobs in dungeons at all, but no matter how much I’m against it, I have to begrudgingly admit that ArenaNet’s design allows for it, be it a conscious decision on their behalf or not.

If they really want to stop skipping, they just need to look at games like Painkiller, where progress halts until every last enemy in an area has been disposed of.
And in doing that, I think it would highlight the problems with their dungeons even more.

People want challenging encounters that don’t take up a huge amount of time; something that will take 15 minutes of their time all-in. Much more than that and fatigue and frustration start to set in.
So different “paths” of dungeons could be split into 15 minute sections, with the aim being maybe an hour maximum.

Something else they don’t allow for is downtime; after a particularly challenging fight, more often than not you’re straight back to fighting something else difficult.
They should look at allowing more time to recuperate between fights, maybe padding it out with in-game exposition (NOT CUTSCENES). Nothing too lengthy, as when repeating content, this fluff gets annoying. But it needs to be enough to allow players to wind down.

And one of the biggest problems GW2 faces is one of communication.
Guilds and friends will regularly use a third-party app such as Teamspeak, Ventrillo or Mumble. But when you’re recruiting randoms for a PUG run, you’re back to relying on text. This can result in tension as people say things in text chat that may come across as rude or elitist. Inflection is lost in text.
A lot of people also won’t bother to explain tactics and will just run on and get frustrated when others aren’t following.
You can ask people to join your voice chat, but it’s inconvenient for you and them, possibly requiring the transferal of a lot of technical information very quickly. The person may not be familiar with the voice app you use, or they may not want to install the program on their computer.

Which raises one of the things I was most surprised about when first playing GW2.
I couldn’t believe that such a modern MMO had no built-in VOIP. It’s a massive step backwards.
I think that if they implemented in-game VOIP with comprehensive channels, we’d be a lot better off and groups would have an easier time of things.

why would I want to spend 20 minutes rolling around in circles playing like crazy only to be rewarded 1 green item and some silver, when I can stand in one spot, do more dps and not have to worry about it?

The problem is with the game, not the players.

In my opinion, the problem lies with te fact that you can’t please everyone all the time. On the forums and in-game, you hear the following all the time:

- I want more challenging content
- LFG 4War/1Mes speed runs
- There’s no endgame!
- LFG CoF path 1 only
- I want my Legendary now!
- I want reward for everything I do
- Don’t want to do fractals, want to farm CoF for moar gold!
- LFG AC -[response] no way dude, they buffed it, just do CoF
- Game is too easy!!

You get all these conflicting ideas of what a game should/shouldn’t be. People want challenging content but then gripe about how hard SSC is. They want speed runs of CoF for max profit, but aren’t willing to do another dungeon for fun. They say there’s not endgame but haven’t 100% world complete or aren’t running anything but fractal 38 and CoF. They can’t stand slow dungeon runs and want their Legendaries now. They want expansions and new permanent content for more to do, but really just speed thru everything expecting rare loot immediately.

The problem is that players (generally speaking) expect an immediate reward for everything they do. Nobody does what’s fun. They only do what makes em gold or fat loot.

I remember in GW going to FOW and coming away with 1 ecto and a couple crappy vendor-worthy gold items…nothing special. But I had a blast in there. Seems it’s all about the destination and never about the ride there anymore.

Seras.5702:

I remember in GW going to FOW and coming away with 1 ecto and a couple crappy vendor-worthy gold items…nothing special. But I had a blast in there. Seems it’s all about the destination and never about the ride there anymore.

Coming out of FoW with an ecto was actually pretty special, seeing how only a handful of enemies could drop them in there.

Oh, and the difference between FoW/UW/DoA and GW2 ‘endgame’? FoW/UW/DoA at least rewarded you for doing the harder content. GW2 punishes you for doing so.

it all comes down to Effort+Time invested vs Reward

why would a player waste 5 hours in lets assume arah when you can do CoF or SoE for the same reward in less than an hour

make Dungeon monsters drop better stuff i dunno even decent tier materials with high frequency and no DR for the random mobs only .

also make each dungeon have its own Craft Material tier per level (dunno if they work this way already) example AC drops tier 1 or 2 materials and arah drops tier 5 and 6 mats.

give each dungeon its own reward table example CoF gives 15 silver then longest dungeon (wich i assume is arah) should give up to 1 or 2 gold depending on path and effort invested

example:
number of mobs killed/assists —mini boss and optional event mobs worth some extra points or something

team mates revived and healed

changes like this where it rewarded players for actually playing and working hard for their reward would encourage them to do more than just farm 1 dungeon.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

why would I want to spend 20 minutes rolling around in circles playing like crazy only to be rewarded 1 green item and some silver, when I can stand in one spot, do more dps and not have to worry about it?

The problem is with the game, not the players.

We may be referring to different exploits, but the exploits I’m referring to normally ends with the battle taking twice as long because your skills are limited by range / the nature of the exploit.

Also, why wouldn’t you want to roll around and play like crazy? The core of GW2’s gameplay is about rolling around playing crazy. I feel like your statement is the same as saying, “Why would I want to crouch for cover and attempt to take shots at the enemy in Battlefield?”

The problem may be with the game, but we as players can control how we respond to that exploit.

Obviously, you enjoy participating in exploits, and you find the exploit more worthwhile than the content. I’m in no way attempting to change your view. Everyone is going to play the way they want despite countless banned accounts, the negative impact on the game’s short and long term status, and the impact on the game’s community.

However, to go on without even bringing this issue up to the community, I feel, would be a disservice to my gameplay as well as others since in MMO’s we all impact each other’s gameplay, indirectly or directly.

TheUndefined.1720:

Personally, I think the ugly truth is, players in GW2 claim they want challenging content, but really they want the easiest possible way to obtain whatever goals they’ve accepted.

More than truth, you only need to look at the molten facility runs in the Flame and Frost Living Story to see what most of the players really want. We had two really good bossfights, one was the testing ground and the other was a fight against two bosses. With enough movement you could handle the first fight very easy, but as soon players found savespots to avoid the mechanics all of them started to use this savespot exploit.
Also true in the final bossfight of this dungeon, pug expected you to use a savespot under the berserker to avoid damage from his flameshockwave and all other shockwaves, thus lenghen the fight, because no one dared to pull him out of his shield. but make it easy enough for all to finish him. Some even thought it was the only way to beat him, but they forget that you could do the boss with enough movement.

In my opinion most players dont want challenging bossfights or even think about the mechanics, they just want to have a easy time with everything and use exploits like it is just a normal thing just to make this fight easier, even if this means to turn one of the best fights in the entire game into a boring brain dead encounter.

I kniow that the molten facility isn’t available anymore but it is a good example of how exploiting can ruin good encounters and the fun and challenge to fight them.

I think there are too many exploits, like more than none, but there are some reasons for them

- Major boss mobs should be designed with attacks and movement that prevent exploits. This is nothing new in MMO design and is part of the requirements for a well designed enemy.

- Mobs glitch a lot. Players feel that if they frequently lose out from the glitches they should sometimes win from glitches too. That’s human nature.

- Some fights are designed to be so tedious that players regularly find new ways to exploit it. Anyone seeing the exploit will use it rather than suffer the tedium of the regular fight again and again. The general in the dredge fractal is probably the prime example of this. Having said that, players also exploit easy bosses and that really is just their laziness.

- Players who object to exploits can find themselves kicked out of a group easily so many players don’t risk that. The people who exploit are generally not the players who patiently discuss alternative strategies.

All those points are design issues. The software could have less glitches, more enjoyable fights, better group tools, and so on.

Dawdler.8521:

Exploits are used because:

- Mobs give kittenty rewards to the point its not even worth killing them
- Mobs have a bazillion hitpoints and tedius mechanics
- Instances that are designed just to take time and toy with the patience of the player rather than be fun (harpy fractal prime design example, or swamp).
- Oh and did I forget to mention that mobs dont have any loot worth killing them for?

Make instances fun and worth it and you’ll see the level of exploits drop considerably. Skip all the mobs up to Lupicus by exploiting the left path you say? Give each of them a very high chance to drop 1-3 T6 dusts and you’ll have a whole community foaming at the mouth.

This.

Rezzet.3614:

it all comes down to Effort+Time invested vs Reward

why would a player waste 5 hours in lets assume arah when you can do CoF or SoE for the same reward in less than an hour

See, that right there is the problem. Nobody is playing the game to have fun. Everyone is playing for a reward item. Now don’t get me wrong, we need rewards. We need gear & weapons & other fun stuff. But it seems nobody wants to play through Arah for the fun of it, because you can do CoF#1 (which you’ve speed ran a thousand times already) for the same reward. Why do you even want to run the same kitten thing over and over and over again? Why even play the game, regardless of the rewards, if it’s not for the fun of it? And don’t tell me speed running CoF#1 10x/day is fun, cuz it’s not.

*ok, not everyone but a lot of people

They grind for achievement. And achievement <> fun.

Peetee.9406:

Many of the dungeons in this game are simply too long, there are too many trash packs and mobs have too many hps.

Yep

Hate to glaze over all these more long-winded posts b/c they really are well-stated and do a great job of not-generalizing things, or in Erasculio’s case, generalize exactly the right culprit.

But this is a really a simple problem to state. Big dumb Hitpoint bars that 2-shot you, …just like the Titans at the end of Prophecies where everyone was running Winter gimmick…. instead of nukeable & engaging hordes of Enemies who spread out and kite/heal. So naturally you end up with a real slog that most of the “Fun people to hang out with” all avoid like the plague. Meaning there’s no one else doing it but the humorless elitist Grinders in a lot of cases. Where is the fun drrping around? Where is the casual weekly 2-hour FOW “clear”? …. we don’t even so much as have Daily Challenge missions (for Storage Runes & Zcoins).

It’s REALLY easy to fix too…. just replace ALL of these “Silver” mobs in the long spans of Dungeons that most people usually Glitch or run past… with big hordes of smarter Veteran and Underling mobs who actually work together like the AI of Paramilitary spawns in GW1 did. …Only keep the Silver mobs in certain bottlenecks where a required objective is. Don’t just leave the entire map coated with Silvers and Champions…. that’s the entire reason those mobs don’t feel unique, there’s just too darn many of them and they don’t die fast enough to be worth their drops. (nor do they overwhelm the players in a way that makes anything but Zerker gear the FOTY)

While I don’t agree with exploits (or skipping for that matter, although they’re two different things) I can see why people use them in some cases:

-A lot of the dungeons have way too many useless trash mobs that just take too long to kill, can in some cases be dangerous, while offering very little rewards to the players.
-A fair amount of mobs in dungeons aren’t fun to fight because they constantly spam knockbacks/knockdowns/stuns/fears. Yeah, there’s skills to counter these abilities, but they are on cooldown more than the enemies will spam their CC abilities.
-Too many boss monsters are boring fights that only take long because they have a ton of HP. These bosses take little to no skill to beat, but just take too long.

To come to a conclusion: Stuff in dungeons isn’t worth fighting the real way due to low rewards and much higher risks on content that takes much longer to beat than easy open world content. Exploiting speeds up the rate at which dungeons can be beat to up their reward vs time ratio (and generally lowers the risks as well), to bring them more up to par to open world content.

What needs to happen is to make the system more solid to make exploits a lot less easy to pull off (although I can imagine this being quite difficult to fix). The harder it is to exploit, the less people will try it. Up the dungeon rewards to match the time + risks vs. rewards ratio (and/or lower open world rewards). Have less annoying mobs that use constant CC spam on players and have less HP. Have bosses with more interesting mechanics.

One thing to note here is that skipping itself is something handed down to new players entering dungeons.

Most people don’t actually experience the dungeon the way you’re ‘supposed’ to before deciding to skip. I think it’s more like people get trapped in it. They get into a group not really knowing what to do and learn the encounters by following people. It may seem like a bunch of BS to them, but they’ll follow along just to avoid rocking the boat.

After a point people aren’t familiar enough with the way to do things the straightforward way to actually do them right, if they know how to do them at all. This goes hand in hand with some of my first experiences in Arah with four friends and someone else we picked up off gw2lfg to fill out the group. The four of us were first timers and proceeded to do the dungeon by slowly plowing through everything. The pick-up guy was getting impatient and tried to get us to skip over stuff using terrain exploits and running through mobs and the like. But all the skipping stuff got screwed up because we didn’t know what we were doing there either. So out of frustration we asked what the skipping was saving, and to my everlasting amazement…our Arah vet didn’t know. Out of his dozens of runs he had never, once, done the dungeon all the way through without exploits. He didn’t know how the encounters worked any other way, or what was being avoided by trying to skip.

He was just repeating the dungeon by rote and a bunch of first-timers followed his lead.

I’ve learned that people will revert to skip tactics because they’re afraid of and embarrassed by failure if they can’t actually do it another way. You can become efficient enough to plow through dungeons doing them the proper way to the point where there’s nothing to be gained through exploits. People just won’t do it by and large because there will be someone in the group that will push the exploit/BS tactic if an attempt to do it straight fails.

Skipping as a trend is a result of social pressure, just like waypoint zerging was before. People wouldn’t help downed players when they could tell them to just use the waypoint. Then the mechanics changed and that tactic was impossible. You may notice that the complaints about it didn’t really last and most people don’t really lament the days before when you didn’t have to support your team members.

In my experience skipping content in dungeons distills the experience into the most dull and mechanical process it could possibly be. I don’t think it will go away until the tactics simply stop working, because at the moment it’s too hard to convince a bunch of people who learned the dungeon through skip and exploit tactics to struggle through doing it without the crutch, because they will have to fail a few times in the process.

Milennin.4825:

What needs to happen is to make the system more solid to make exploits a lot less easy to pull off (although I can imagine this being quite difficult to fix). The harder it is to exploit, the less people will try it. Up the dungeon rewards to match the time + risks vs. rewards ratio (and/or lower open world rewards). Have less annoying mobs that use constant CC spam on players and have less HP. Have bosses with more interesting mechanics.

Look at AC. Bosses got new mechanics, monsters have less health and I think that making players carry skills against CC is a good thing.
And what changed ? Almost nothing : everything is still skipped, and players try to exploit bosses.
Oh and because players aren’t bothering to try to understand the new mechanics, they complain that some bosses cannot be beaten without exploiting.

The problem with monsters health is that you have to find the middle ground between 4 Berserker Warriors + 1 Mesmer and a team with Rangers, Necromancers and Engineers in it, and some of them not at level 80 with full exotics/ascended, because no matter how great the boss’ mechanics are, if he dies in 8 seconds, it doesn’t matter.

I just wished Anet was a little faster to fixing some exploits, especially when some “simply” require to remove a boulder, or add one to block the path.

RedStar.4218:

Look at AC. Bosses got new mechanics, monsters have less health and I think that making players carry skills against CC is a good thing.
And what changed ? Almost nothing : everything is still skipped, and players try to exploit bosses.
Oh and because players aren’t bothering to try to understand the new mechanics, they complain that some bosses cannot be beaten without exploiting.

Because the mobs got even more knockbacks than they had before while dropping nothing more or better than before the patch.
I haven’t played for a few weeks, but I can’t remember groups exploiting the boss in path 1. Every PUG I’ve joined did it the normal way just fine.
Boss on path 2 bugs itself out by staying stunned under the traps. Other than that, I haven’t seen groups actively exploiting this one.
Boss on path 3 is exploited for 2 main reasons:
-Too easy to exploit. There’s like 3 different spots you can lure him to where the rocks won’t hit the players.
-The NPC isn’t good enough for what it needs to do. It either dies too fast, or it’s too slow to bring up the shield, resulting in dead players all over the place.

P1 is variable, but it’s generally horrible because players completely spread out, making adds a real trouble after a few minutes.

P2 doesn’t seem to bug as much now, but my PuGs rarely think about bringing a reflect.

And I think they fixed P3, not sure. But I haven’t encountered a problem with the npc.

However I think there are still some exploits, from what my guildies tell me. But I don’t know for sure, because the only time I go to AC is when I have at least 2 guildies to make sure that we don’t have to exploit in order to play the game.

What I’ve seen happen though, is that no one DOESN’T want to do the exploits. Sorrow’s Embrace is the dungeon I’ve been running for awhile now, and if it weren’t for the exploits no one would be running it. Also, if the enemies gave slightly better rewards we wouldn’t be so inclined to run past them. Maybe make drops better, or make it so enemies have a chance to drop a token, or whatever, but make them worth fighting and I KNOW these people will fight ‘em. Now, I don’t like exploiting, but when it’s me against the 4 other party members, I kinda have to do what they want or risk being kicked halfway through the dungeon.