Guild Wars 2

I have always wondered why GW2 doesn’t have a concept of “Dynamic Loot” bags or “Equilibrium Loot”.

You could set upper and lower thresholds for all materials where their drop rate will increase or decrease based on what price range you want the material to sit within.

i.e.,

The economist could say “I want charged lodestones between 50 silver and 2 gold” (linked to inflation) and if it starts to go to 3g then it starts dropping from the ‘dynamic loot bags’ more frequently – as the price heads back to 2 gold it returns to its normal drop rate.

Mitch.4781:

Wow, so your logic is to disuade people from doing stuff they like into stuff they don’t?

I don’t know if you guys ever thought about this, but if Dungeons were so popular, instead of removing content and incentive from the game, why not focus MORE on dungeons if that’s what people want?

Well, all I can say is, it’s your game, your rules. But also my choice which game I put my time and money into. I’ve literally never seen a developer go out of their way to sabotage their own game.

Baffling.

It makes no sense you are absolutely right. You can see from years on the forums of what people want AND like. Anet’s response is… ‘nah kitten you guys we know what you want and to make sure you don’t ever do your enjoyed activity we are removing the currency you get from it. Cya!’

I’d like to know what percentage of the economy is controlled by what percentage of the players. It’s my belief that a very small percentage controls the majority going back to the precursor debacle at launch. This to me is not good for the majority of players.

dzeRnumbrd.6129:

I have always wondered why GW2 doesn’t have a concept of “Dynamic Loot” bags or “Equilibrium Loot”.

You could set upper and lower thresholds for all materials where their drop rate will increase or decrease based on what price range you want the material to sit within.

i.e.,

The economist could say “I want charged lodestones between 50 silver and 2 gold” (linked to inflation) and if it starts to go to 3g then it starts dropping from the ‘dynamic loot bags’ more frequently – as the price heads back to 2 gold it returns to its normal drop rate.

And simplify the economy ? what? You must not understand how things work around Anet during gw2, in gw1 they had loot figured out, they had loot tables, loot scaling and the whole works, it made farming actually really fun, I guess they are following the motto of “If it ain’t broke, fix it til’ it is”.

Mitch.4781:

By the way, I spent 100 bucks on the expansion. Other than that, you will never get one more red cent from me through the Gem Store. No matter HOW flashy the staff or finisher. That’s it.

Just some little economic balancing of my own

x100

I was about to write the same thing.

I just don’t get anet anymore.

After HoT change do you predict that mats cost will be lessen or more expensive for crafting Legendary ? If so why mid level zone still give map bonus with kittens mats.Can Dev team make change which tier of mats you can have after getting map bonus?

Buy HoT!!! Buy more gems!! Buy HoT!!! Buy more gems!! Buy HoT!! Buy more gems!! We are changing the economy up a little.

Pretty Pixie.8603:

So if the goal is to move income generation behind time and gear gated content (a dev did come out to say raids require ascended; another clarified it on reddit by saying it was ‘recommended’) aren’t you excluding the casual audience you’ve marketed to the last 3 years?

Raids need BiS gear and high communication, fractals at a high level (with the goalposts moved to 100) have a high gear requirement for casual players. If you then remove (by all intents and purposes; dungeons will likely be abandoned if there’s no sufficient reward for your efforts) dungeons as an income stream, with the alternative locked away behind a skill/gear/communication wall, you create a two tier system with a minority able to get a solid income, and casual pve players left in the dust, while the economy marches on.

casual pve can play low fractals… low fractal rewards have always been better than dungeons to begin with, now even more so since you can take them in small chunks.

Torolan.5816:

@König des Todes
You don´t know Anet won´t drop them. You just don´t. If the next cycle of fotm content is reached, raids may be dropped quickly again under the flag of “This is new, this is groundbreaking, this is exciting!”. Could very well reasonably happen.
Konrad Adenauer probably said it best:
“What do I care for my speech from yesterday?”

Exactly. My. Point.

Technically, we can never know for sure.

But now ArenaNet has given us empirical evidence that would support them dropping it. Because just about all past “new, groundbreaking, exciting” stuff they did end up dropping after 1 or 2 iterations.

With the intention to deincentivize dungeons, here’s my question for ArenaNet:

Where’s the casual/semi-casual 5-man group gameplay?

• You have open world – full on casual, even Tequatl is by now.
• You have story instances – full on casual, and solo’d.
• You have fractals – short timespan 5-man high level content, with how they’re going about things.
• You have raids – long timespan 10-man high level content

Dungeons fill a particular niche and they are trying to remove it. They are removing part of their playerbase. They’re not just ignoring dungeons anymore, they’re removing them. Maybe not fully – yet, at least – but that’s what they’re doing.

And if ArenaNet is willy-nilly about removing working-but-not-perfect content in GW2 when even in GW1 the most broken content in terms of profit-to-easiness remained for years and years, what guarantee do we have that ArenaNet won’t remove other such content?

Ah, wait. They are. Underwater content they’re also removing, piece by piece.

@ArenaNet, you’re taking the game we paid for away. Do you really think people will keep paying long-term for this? Or have you become like EA – just interested in quick moneygrabs no matter what great games and stories you ruin?

Smells like Nexon behind most of these income nerfs.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

John Smith.4610:

Is the intention to deincentivize dungeons
Yes

Is the intention to reduce targeted liquid gold earning, or are you putting that liquid somewhere else thats targetable?
The intention is not entirely to reduce liquid gold earning, we’ll be using up the slack we generate in other locations

What type of instanced content do you see offering marketable rewards that players can take part in on a regular basis?
Fractals

This is a very sad thing, in my opinion.

Dungeons in GW2 have their own niche, but you’re removing them in favor of Fractals because…

No reason given.

Allow me to state one thing:

Dungeons are NOT the same as Fractals.

Fractals are NOT the same as dungeons.

They care to two different groups of players, even though they both focus on 5-man groups.

In all honesty, I don’t mind the “no more dungeons, only fractals and raids” but to deincentivize dungeons is no different than removing a gamestyle that a certain group will only like. And that means losing players. Which means no future profits from said players.

What’s worse was that back in 2013 you guys promised to revamp dungeons, with the changes to Ascalon Catacombs being the first set of such, but then you decided to just go do other things. You said the same with world bosses, with Tequatl being the first one, but then you just decided to go do other things. How does that make us feel about these promises of “the first of many” with HoT? How do we know you guys aren’t just going to not only abandon raids after the first one, but then deincentivize them later down the road?

In all honesty, I don’t get the intention behind doing this. And you guys don’t explain.

What the hell is so bad about dungeons that you would rather give them Isaiah’s Balance than to make them proper gamestyles that get discontinued?

I bought HoT two weekends ago because I figured you guys were actually going down the right path again.

Apparently I was wrong.

Though employees of ArenaNet will vehemently deny my claims, and will deny that they’re doing so based entirely on the fact that their jobs depend on it, the reason they made the base game free is precisely because of this. I can almost guarantee it.

Over the years ANet has made an impressive game, but they’ve made a lot of promises, and broken the majority of them when it comes to content. UI? Quality of Life? Sure, they’ve made some decent changes there and come through more than once. Content-wise? Guild Wars 2 is spiraling out of control as a failed and mismanaged experiment.

I’ve opted not to purchase Heart of Thorns. (Cue White Knights saying “Nothing of value was lost”, because they’re mindless drones conditioned to blindly support what they enjoy like religious zealots). I’m not avoiding the game specifically because they’re reducing the incentive to play dungeons, but because this is setting a negative precedent that will impact the rest of the game as time goes on. When will they start to nerf world events like Tequatl and the rest? Probably around the next expansion when they want you to play the newer content. They can’t have you wasting time and resources on older content. It’s why WoW always ups their level cap, so the older content is no longer necessary and they do not have to keep pouring in resources to keep it up to date. (Which is why Cataclysm was such an utter failure).

GW2 is trying to be different, and it is failing utterly at doing so. They had the chance to be unique, but they’re squandering the chance. Though it ultimately boils down to economics. You cannot make a profit off of older content, so removing it is your best option. How much do you want to make a bet that they’ll eventually just start offering dungeon skins in the gem store? Probably around the next expansion. I doubt it’ll happen anytime soon.

Again, cue the White Knights. And we’ll see how the future goes.

If anything, they should rebalance the gold distro per dungeon. There are already paths that most people consider not ‘worth’ doing. When they first announced fixing dungeon rewards ages ago I was once truly excited! Found out that AC paths are ~1.5, 3/4 of Arah is 3g one 1.5, rest of’m -Aether (also not rewarding enough) is ~1g. Was like whoever balanced those path rewards had no idea what they were doing.

I think they should add more monetary rewards to all those randomly skipped champ mobs/trash people skip and rebalance the end rewards of every dungeon path based on some (on ANY) scale at all. Then and only then should they tweak the numbers. But.. since they wont fix dungeons anymore, thats highly unlikely.

TLDR: If you’re going to do this, do it right or not at all. Flat gold nerfs or whatever you have planned is lazy and you’re not doing your job. Like the last guys that did a pass at this and.. if memory serves, they were fired

I’ll be up front and say I hope many of these unpopular changes come back and bite them.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

@ArenaNet, you’re taking the game we paid for away. Do you really think people will keep paying long-term for this? Or have you become like EA – just interested in quick moneygrabs no matter what great games and stories you ruin?

Please tell me that is sarcasm. Updates in mmorpg often involves them fading/removing older content (Dungeons was highly neglected from updates too). Ultimately, you got what you paid for, the value of “time spent playing”. They’re not deleting dungeons, dungeons will still exist.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Dungeons in GW2 have their own niche, but you’re removing them in favor of Fractals because…

No reason given.

But they gave us a reason in the Blogpost. They won’t support dungeons and fractals, probably because they feasibly can’t / it takes too much time, so they chose to support only fractals (the newer content).

The devs can only support (balance around new skills, fix upcoming new exploits,…) so much, with raids incoming they have to choose.

Another reason I can see: Since fractals aren’t random anymore with the launch of HoT it will probably get much harder to find people for groups. The playerbase is split between each single fractal and dungeons. The less players are in dungeons, the more will turn to fractals – so it gets much easier to get into pugs.

Three Cheers for John Smith!

I am looking forward to a change (read: reduction) in the value of dungeon SPEED RUNNING. Feeling tremendous pressure to force myself through endless repetition as fast as possible to sate the need of added value will be a great stress relief as I look forward to the release of hot. In John Smith I trust.

obligatory relevant M. Python scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExWfh6sGyso

I think HoT was the last thing i’ve bought from Anet and that’s my economic decision for now.

Taking away something that is popular is just dumb. Also, if it was a support issue they would have totally taken it away. They didn’t do that they just nuked the rewards. That is pretty telling. If they can’t support dungeons, why do they continue to exist? This is a blatant attempt to cajole people into buying HoT. This is a big screw you to people who bought the original game but haven’t bought HoT.

@Dashingsteel.3410 I think taking away something popular that negatively effects the experience of the game makes perfect sense.

What is negative about dungeons?

Dashingsteel.3410:

If they can’t support dungeons, why do they continue to exist? This is a blatant attempt to cajole people into buying HoT. This is a big screw you to people who bought the original game but haven’t bought HoT.

What? Fractals are part of the original game.

Sure is funny that suddenly dungeons are negatively impacting the economy. Oh and it just so happens that the expansion is about to get released. hmmmmmmmm……

@Dashingsteel.3410 They aren’t removing dungeons or the dungeon specific content, they are balancing the weight of the monetary rewards provided by dungeons against the rewards provided by the whole of the experience of the game. I see this as Arenas’ move to make the whole of the game more rewarding to play rather than codger you into constantly speed clearing the same 10 paths.

John Smith.4610:

Swagger.1459:

Howdy John! Any plans to reduce the amount of bolts of silk required for crafting spools of silk weaving thread?

Nope

This response is unacceptable without elaborating about adding a means not RNG related for acquiring these materials.

For that matter, what is gonna be done about low level material acquisition ?
I mean as a level cap player it is harder to get low level mats than it is to acquire level 80 materials.

Thank you QQers [sarcasm] that demanded for loot in low level zones to be level 80 instead of map specific level !!!

I’m a little disturbed by the level of antagonism here over the gold reward going down for dungeons. I think the concern is less over the content changes, and more over your 40g a day cash flow.

Running a series of the easiest and fastest dungeon paths, skipping as much content as possible, is generally not done to be ‘fun’. It is done strictly for gold, and it’s easy money.

The gold rewards are going down to disincentivize running easy paths for gold. People will continue to play dungeons for tokens, and if the drops are improved – people might even kill things in dungeons instead of skipping to the boss.

Dashingsteel.3410:

What is negative about dungeons?

The responsible designer for dungeons at Anet is long gone. Anet can only balance so much, so they decided to balance the most played stuff / new stuff: Fractals.

With HoT there will be a lot of new skills and traits, so new exploits will show up. The devs are very invested with balancing raids and the new version of fractals, but they don’t have infinite ressources.

I see this as an attempt to funnel players into the content that the developers have chosen to push. Raids and fractals are what the developers want you to play and this is a way to punish those who don’t choose to follow along.

Frank.7452:

The gold rewards are going down to disincentivize running easy paths for gold. People will continue to play dungeons for tokens, and if the drops are improved – people might even kill things in dungeons instead of skipping to the boss.

The drops won’t be improved though. Also, they’ve already said they are nerfing what matts you get from salvaging!!!!

GRIND WARS 2!!!!!!!

@Dashingsteel.3410 You’re already being funneled into speed clearing dungeons.

edited to add @Dashingsteel.3410

Averath.6283:

I’ve opted not to purchase Heart of Thorns. (Cue White Knights saying “Nothing of value was lost”, because they’re mindless drones conditioned to blindly support what they enjoy like religious zealots). I’m not avoiding the game specifically because they’re reducing the incentive to play dungeons, but because this is setting a negative precedent that will impact the rest of the game as time goes on. When will they start to nerf world events like Tequatl and the rest? Probably around the next expansion when they want you to play the newer content. They can’t have you wasting time and resources on older content. It’s why WoW always ups their level cap, so the older content is no longer necessary and they do not have to keep pouring in resources to keep it up to date. (Which is why Cataclysm was such an utter failure).

They’ve already nerfed core methods of making money, but in indirect, unexplained ways. Key farming was gutted with no proper explanation on when exactly it resets (which is borked), and removing karma boosts from enchanted reward scrolls means less linen/wool in the TP (combine this situation with reduced salvage yields and ascended gear being required recommended for raids).

By the middle of next year (or next month if this trend continues), I imagine the following will have happened:

Weapons that require mystic coins and spirit shards will become account bound on acquire.

Chest running will be severely nerfed by reduced items or time gating (you can open five chests per vernal equinox per account).

The mystic forge will no longer accept karma gear.

Tequatl karma and/or gold will be nerfed. The world chest will be bound to account instead of character.

Champion bags will be based on RNG (without any exact percentages, of course), but Anet will introduce an 8,000,000th currency in its place that gives you a quarter of the previous value.

Given how often they throw out or neglect older systems and replace them with new ones, I’m actually kind of terrified by my predictions.

Dashingsteel.3410:

I see this as an attempt to funnel players into the content that the developers have chosen to push. Raids and fractals are what the developers want you to play and this is a way to punish those who don’t choose to follow along.

That’s why this change makes even LESS sense. HOT will be brand new teaming with new content, maps, legendaries, events raids, armours etc etc. EVERYONE is going to be in there and the original maps will be barren. Groups for SW, ORR Temples and yes dungeons will already be harder to get because people will be far too busy with the new content.

So why dissuade people from old maps and content UNLESS, you really are not that satisfied they will like the new stuff? Is the new content that lacklustre you need to force people into it? Worrying thinking behind all of this.

It’s one of the most bizarre decisions I’ve even seen a dev make, especially right on top of a brand new expansion.

I don’t even do dungeons, but I think it is wrong that they are nerfing them. This redirecting of loot in favor of HoT content doesn’t sit well with me. No need to nerf the loot just make HoT loot comparible.

@Dashingsteel.3410
Look if I have an engineer, and my engineer has a flamethrower, and my flame thrower has 1200 range and deals 14kdps, lowering the dps/range might be unpopular with everyone using the flamethrower, but it doesn’t mean it isn’t the right thing to do, even if it means that now my flamethrower isn’t as fun/rewarding.

trogdor.

About dungeon reward nerfing im all in favor…if you need gold you can just farm them or do SW…that’s wrong…i’m glad they are balancing the reward.
Gogo Anet!!

Even 3 years of dungeon ignoring, 2 years of fractal ignoring A.net still cant get people to stop playing.

Whats next?

How about instead of earning ~1g I have to pay a ~1g entrance fee, maybe that’ll stop us evil players from doing your content.

Akikaze.1307:

Konig Des Todes.2086:

@ArenaNet, you’re taking the game we paid for away. Do you really think people will keep paying long-term for this? Or have you become like EA – just interested in quick moneygrabs no matter what great games and stories you ruin?

Please tell me that is sarcasm. Updates in mmorpg often involves them fading/removing older content (Dungeons was highly neglected from updates too). Ultimately, you got what you paid for, the value of “time spent playing”. They’re not deleting dungeons, dungeons will still exist.

If you’re going to bring up other MMORPGs, let me bring up WoW. When the very first expansion came out, vanilla dungeons became trivial. The increased levels and increased gear stats meant that eventually you’d just be able to solo all the dungeons in vanilla without much effort. The same happened when Wrath came out and suddenly all Burning Crusade content became trivial.

Unfortunately ArenaNet have adopted the stance that all content should be challenging at all stages of the game. This means that even if you’re at level 80 with max level gear, your stats will be downgraded when you step into a dungeon. The dungeon may not be as difficult as it was when you were the appropriate level, but you can still die to the content. For a lot of players, this means that you simply cannot solo a dungeon, it requires a group.

Imagine if those vanilla dungeons were still difficult. Why would anyone run them? The rewards are worthless compared to TBC dungeons. Why would anyone run TBC dungeons when Wrath came out? The answer was “Primarily for fun by myself when I am bored”. You do not have that luxury in GW2. Most players don’t have that luxury in GW2. The dungeons will not be decreasing in difficulty, they’re just decreasing the rewards to make them worthless to run. Why bother running a dungeon when you can run a fractal with rewards that were not nerfed to the ground? Why bother running a dungeon, when you can try a raid and try to get those rewards? Why bother with a dungeon, when you can just farm events for gold?

Akikaze.1307:

Please tell me that is sarcasm. Updates in mmorpg often involves them fading/removing older content (Dungeons was highly neglected from updates too). Ultimately, you got what you paid for, the value of “time spent playing”. They’re not deleting dungeons, dungeons will still exist.

They’re not deleting dungeons… yet.

But honestly, when you look at the other things that were promoted greatly by ArenaNet at/before launch yet were neglected afterwards, and where they are now… dungeons aren’t unlikely to follow the trend that underwater combat and personality systems went (among other things).

And that was the point of my post, if you actually read it. They’re openly wanting to push players away from dungeons – for no reason given – after years of no changes to them beyond exploit fixes. So when will dungeons go the way of the personality system, which was functional upon release but removed in the NPE? When will they go the way of underwater combat, which has not only been ignored for so kitten long, but ArenaNet has been pushing players away from it by reduced aquatic weapon skins, removing it from PvP, early PvE zones, and most of WvW.

There were problems with dungeons, yes, but rather than spending time to reduce incentive to do dungeons they could have spent the same amount of time and effort to fix those problems.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Dungeons in GW2 have their own niche, but you’re removing them in favor of Fractals because…

No reason given.

But they gave us a reason in the Blogpost. They won’t support dungeons and fractals, probably because they feasibly can’t / it takes too much time, so they chose to support only fractals (the newer content).

The devs can only support (balance around new skills, fix upcoming new exploits,…) so much, with raids incoming they have to choose.

Their reason was “we don’t do it”.

I’m sorry but “we won’t do it” isn’t a reason. It’s an action. For unknown-to-us reason, they stopped doing an action.

And you have to just randomly guess at the reason why.

Furthermore, there is a VAST difference between “not supporting” and “deincentivizing” content.

They don’t have to support dungeons. But that doesn’t mean they have to push players away from them.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

The less players are in dungeons, the more will turn to fractals – so it gets much easier to get into pugs.

In other words players who do dungeons but not fractals are SOL because “consolodating playerbase” which is exactly what the LFG is for.

I think people will play less if they find the game less rewarding than before. It is already rather difficult to find people to do dungeons with compared to some other activities and you are making it less rewarding to dungeon now. Even if you do force people to play dungeons to farm for dungeon tokens to make new legendaries, there is always that smaller reward players have to put up with, and it sort of kills the joy, ya know what i’m saying

fishball.7204:

I don’t understand the nerf to dungeon rewards, they were already like 4th or 5th on the gold/hour scale behind other methods such kitten chest farm.

Does the reward team even understand how to hand out rewards properly? People already flock to what is profitable (eg. world bosses, SW chest, dungeons) and ignore content that isn’t profitable. Rather than nerf dungeons they should have addressed the paltry rewards in open world events not killing off what little incentive there was to do dungeons.

If things like SW chest farm aren’t addressed then this just looks like ANet trying to shoehorn people into doing raids by making dungeons undesirable.

I think the main difference there is that dungeon actually generate gold. SW is mostly shifting gold generated from other sources.

Frank.7452:

I’m a little disturbed by the level of antagonism here over the gold reward going down for dungeons. I think the concern is less over the content changes, and more over your 40g a day cash flow.

Running a series of the easiest and fastest dungeon paths, skipping as much content as possible, is generally not done to be ‘fun’. It is done strictly for gold, and it’s easy money.

The gold rewards are going down to disincentivize running easy paths for gold. People will continue to play dungeons for tokens, and if the drops are improved – people might even kill things in dungeons instead of skipping to the boss.

You’re forgetting one major aspect of GW2. You only participate in content because it gets you closer to your goal. Right now gold is the end-all-beat-all. Gold is what drives the game, and if you cannot get a reasonable amount of gold from a dungeon run, then there is no reason to run a dungeon. Simply nerfing dungeons across the board doesn’t really do much to rectify this massive problem, it just removes dungeons from the equation entirely.

What they should have done is have each dungeon give you a moderate reward based upon the time investment. Figure out an average “gold per hour” for each dungeon and push for that. Have them be lower than something like the Silver Wastes, but not so low that you should simply run the Silver Wastes instead.

This isn’t addressing the core problem with dungeon speed running. It’s ignoring it entirely, and just slapping all dungeons at the same time for the hell of it, while claiming that it’s going to address the problem.

It just shows a lack of confidence in their new content in my opinion, while in other mmos have trouble getting players to play old content and while with this game the designers deliberately not wanting players to play old content.

Just curious, did John Smith give a reasoning for his one word ‘Yes’ answer or just leave it at that, because I would really like to know why if it wasn’t answered yet.

So…

Casual players get excluded from Raids and Fractals by the Elitists that ANet is pandering to (which honestly will leave the Dungeons to the Casual players) BUT you are going to nerf the Dungeons in an attempt to push players to Raids and Fractals.

This sounds a lot like modern politics and Class Separation. The Elitists get what they want with ANet’s blessing (by pushing everyone to other content) and the Casual Players get kicked to the curb.

How about while you nerf Dungeons into the ground, put the Hero System from Guild Wars into all the modes (Story and Explorable) so that the Casuals can see the Arah path 1-4 without having to pay other players to put up with our Non-Meta play style.

Eight Samurai.6840:

Just curious, did John Smith give a reasoning for his one word ‘Yes’ answer or just leave it at that, because I would really like to know why if it wasn’t answered yet.

the answer was in my next question:

essentially they expect people who used to do dungeons for marketable goods/gold to do fractals. They want dungeons to be side shows, not part of the main things people do each day.

Ravion Hawk.4736:

So…

Casual players get excluded from Raids and Fractals by the Elitists that ANet is pandering to (which honestly will leave the Dungeons to the Casual players) BUT you are going to nerf the Dungeons in an attempt to push players to Raids and Fractals.

This sounds a lot like modern politics and Class Separation. The Elitists get what they want with ANet’s blessing (by pushing everyone to other content) and the Casual Players get kicked to the curb.

How about while you nerf Dungeons into the ground, put the Hero System from Guild Wars into all the modes (Story and Explorable) so that the Casuals can see the Arah path 1-4 without having to pay other players to put up with our Non-Meta play style.

That would require a lot of effort. They would have to ensure the NPCs were powerful enough to not die to the mechanics of each boss fight. A lot of players resorted to stacking on bosses because it was the most effective/efficient way to deal with bosses. Because of the combat system, most NPCs would just fall over and die.

It would make more sense to simply make all dungeons kitten-easy so you can solo them. If we’re going to make them irrelevant, than you shouldn’t keep them as challenging content. Some people will argue about the “challenge”, but to casual players it can still be a challenge. Elitist attitudes don’t mean much in this context.

Averath.6283:

Frank.7452:

I’m a little disturbed by the level of antagonism here over the gold reward going down for dungeons. I think the concern is less over the content changes, and more over your 40g a day cash flow.

Running a series of the easiest and fastest dungeon paths, skipping as much content as possible, is generally not done to be ‘fun’. It is done strictly for gold, and it’s easy money.

The gold rewards are going down to disincentivize running easy paths for gold. People will continue to play dungeons for tokens, and if the drops are improved – people might even kill things in dungeons instead of skipping to the boss.

You’re forgetting one major aspect of GW2. You only participate in content because it gets you closer to your goal. Right now gold is the end-all-beat-all. Gold is what drives the game, and if you cannot get a reasonable amount of gold from a dungeon run, then there is no reason to run a dungeon..

Uh, no. I played PvP before reward tracks existed because I found it fun. The same goes for WvW and the chests.

There are players that only do the most economically incentivized thing, which is why there are some commanders that will run in circles in the Silverwastes for more than 10 hours straight. They are the minority in the game. They are the people freaking out right now, because someone moved their cheese.

Averath.6283:

Frank.7452:

I’m a little disturbed by the level of antagonism here over the gold reward going down for dungeons. I think the concern is less over the content changes, and more over your 40g a day cash flow.

Running a series of the easiest and fastest dungeon paths, skipping as much content as possible, is generally not done to be ‘fun’. It is done strictly for gold, and it’s easy money.

The gold rewards are going down to disincentivize running easy paths for gold. People will continue to play dungeons for tokens, and if the drops are improved – people might even kill things in dungeons instead of skipping to the boss.

You’re forgetting one major aspect of GW2. You only participate in content because it gets you closer to your goal. Right now gold is the end-all-beat-all. Gold is what drives the game, and if you cannot get a reasonable amount of gold from a dungeon run, then there is no reason to run a dungeon. Simply nerfing dungeons across the board doesn’t really do much to rectify this massive problem, it just removes dungeons from the equation entirely.

What they should have done is have each dungeon give you a moderate reward based upon the time investment. Figure out an average “gold per hour” for each dungeon and push for that. Have them be lower than something like the Silver Wastes, but not so low that you should simply run the Silver Wastes instead.

This isn’t addressing the core problem with dungeon speed running. It’s ignoring it entirely, and just slapping all dungeons at the same time for the hell of it, while claiming that it’s going to address the problem.

You don’t get it. The devs don’t want to develop dungeons any more. They decided that fractals give them a greater opportunity to innovate, try out new mechanics and not be tied into the PvE maps.

Because that’s where the devs are investing development time, it would be counter productive if players don’t play them so they are discouraging the existing PvE instance content by limiting the gold rewarded, yet again.

You want rewards, don’t do dungeons, do fractals. If they lose players who are doing dungeons solely for gold, oh well but they hope you will try the new fractals that is coming with HoT, you may like it. But since existing legendary weapons still require dungeon tokens, they will still be needed, but needed for dungeon specific rewards and not as a gold faucet.

Nothing said here, suggesting alternatives or warning how this is a bad decision isn’t going to change anything. The word came down a long time ago that all future instance party content will be fractals and raids and that’s it (besides future living world seasons). It was on the HoT site the day they announced the expansion.

I also wouldn’t be surprised if some of this is also part of the “let’s kill the Zerk meta”.

John Smith.4610:

phys.7689:

John Smith.4610:

Ashen.2907:

John Smith.4610:

Q.
why are you nerfing the income of players who prefer your old content over your new content? I for one don’t care much for raids but really enjoy dungeons..

A.
We don’t intend to nerf income, just shift where most players derive their income. You won’t be forced into raids in order to earn value though.

Players who enjoy playing dungeons will have either lower income or will have to play content they do not enjoy as much in order to maintain their existing level of income.

The only way you can accurately claim that you did not intend to nerf their income is to state that you intended to reduce their enjoyment of the game instead.

Edit for clarification: I did not mean you personally, but rather the collective of those who made the decision.

This is called false dilemma. I think you should probably restate this.

Is the intention to deincentivize dungeons

Is the intention to reduce targeted liquid gold earning, or are you putting that liquid somewhere else thats targetable?

What type of instanced content do you see offering marketable rewards that players can take part in on a regular basis?

do you see players seeking to earn main methods being through open world and tp trading

Is the intention to deincentivize dungeons
Yes

Is there any particular reason you guys have for making dungeons obsolete?

Since you want to increase que times on dungeons and make them obsolete, why not just remove them entirely?

Have you given any thought to the fact that (depending on how low the reward is) any one with dungeon master will ignore the existence of dungeons?

Have you considered players who have dungeon master won’t bother with dungeons any more and therefore you’re effectively reducing the replayable value of some content?

My two cents: This is a bad idea. I know if dungeon rewards dropped by 40% or more, I probably won’t touch them again because there will be better places to spend my time, and I really feel for those trying to complete acheivements while no one is bothering with the dungeon content.

Not to mention one of my favorite things about GW2 has always been that all content is relevant in some way. Dungeons have always been aimed at gold / fun with friends, the former will be removed from the equation.

They need to reduce the amount of gold coming into the economy due to all the F2Pers that just started playing too. Otherwise, inflation gets even worse.

John, a few questions. Can you explain to me how the change to dungeon rewards is positive for the community? With all the new players, don’t you think they will find it harder to run them without some sort of incentive. Do you think that tokens and drops will be sufficient to maintain the current frequency of dungeon runs or do you expect them to “fade into black”? If so, what is even the purpose of keeping this content in game, especially considering all the skips, exploits, and brokenness since launch? I understand that you are just the economics guy, but I would hope that at some point this was discussed.

I feel sorry for all of the new players who have yet to complete dungeons after this change, I expect to see many unanswered lfg, do you really think that’s positive for our community?