Guild Wars 2

Kythan Myr.4719:

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?

because a slow fade is less jarring than an explosion, though i wouldnt be surprised if scarlett came back to life and blew up all the dungeons.

Until now, the only thing really stopping me from pre-ordering HoT was a lack of disposable income. I’m willing to withhold final judgment on this until the changes actually go through and I get a chance to see how it all works, but given what little information is available, it isn’t looking too good.

John Smith.4610:

A.
WvW is getting new drops to help facilitate their income, they’re part of the new legendary journeys.

Drops that can be sold and make WvW potentially lucrative, or drops that will plague our banks and be destroyed until a “Mawdrey 2” equivalent comes out?

After thinking about it after awhile, I don’t envy your job, John. Seldom does your line of work bring good news. When you do announce something it often hits many players right where it hurts too. It’s necessary holistically, but you are many a player’s killjoy.

Frank.7452:

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.

PvP and WvW are similar, because they’re both considered “player vs player”. It’s like Battlegrounds vs Arenas in WoW. They’re both PvP. You also don’t really play PvP in other games for monetary gain, you play it for a different gain. Satisfaction and renown. That’s entirely different from PvE. Much of the content in PvE isn’t exceptionally challenging, so it lacks satisfaction and renown (until Raids, of course).

Anyone who doesn’t PvP and wants to progress in the game needs gold. Therefore they need to participate in content that gives them gold. If they want gold, then they’ll do the most effective method to gain gold. It’s just as simple as that. The massive number of players who partake of SW and who participated in the Boss Blitz back in the day illustrate this pretty well.

Behellagh.1468:

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”.

I get and fully understand that they do not want to develop dungeons anymore. That is their choice. I am disagreeing with their blanket chances that affect all the dungeons. As it is right now dungeons are not the best way to spend your time on GW2. SW is probably the best place to be. Dungeons offer you a decent reward, though this applies to a relatively small amount of paths across a fair number of dungeons. This means that a number of paths simply go ignored because they’re not economical to run.

I don’t care if they want to stop production on dungeons. I don’t care if they want to stop support for dungeons and just focus on fractals and raids. That stance, however, does not address the fundamental problem with dungeons. They’ve been ignoring the fundamental problem with dungeons for multiple years now, and this change will address none of those problems. All this change accomplishes is sweeping dungeons under the rug.

If they really wanted to change dungeons for the better, than they would treat them like a valid part of the game and make them balanced against the other parts of the game.

Dungeons are a casual 5-man experience. Fractals are a difficult 5-man experience. Raids are slated to be a very difficult 10-man experience. World event chains, such as the Silver Wastes, are a casual experience on a massive scale with a difficulty far lower than dungeons.

They should have Raids give the greatest rewards, which seems to be the intent. Fractals should give the best rewards for 5-man content. Dungeons should honestly be on-par with a casual experience, so that you can choose if you want to do 5-man content, or open world content. Right now they’re not even close, and they’re going to be kicking them down another rung with this change.

Perhaps the biggest spit in the face is that they’ve still ignored the disparity between time invested vs reward. You get a far greater reward for running shorter paths than you do running longer paths. This is the fundamental issue with dungeons that has gone ignored for years, and now they’ve pretty much announced that they don’t care at all.

Great precedent to set. A selling point of the original game was never addressed and simply abandoned. I can’t wait to see what they abandon from HoT. Will it be raids? Perhaps the “new and improved” fractals? We shall see, huh?

Kythan Myr.4719:

After thinking about it after awhile, I don’t envy your job, John. Seldom does your line of work bring good news. When you do announce something it often hits many players right where it hurts too. It’s necessary holistically, but you are many a player’s killjoy.

In this case it wasn’t necessary. It’s just something devs set out to do because they couldn’t be bothered to fix their old content, and were afraid that their new shiny wouldn’t be received as well as they’d like. So, they decided to give players a kick in the behind in order to get them to move.

It’s an economical change, but it’s not done for economic reasons.

Glad to know my main source of income will be nerfed and I will be forced to do drooling, braindead “dynamic” events in zerg maps.

They say fractals will take up the slack, but I highly doubt it.

Fractals have a daily limit PER 10 LEVEL BRACKET. What this means is currently we have 5 brackets to get a daily from, nowhere near the same amount as dungeon paths.

A full dungeon tour nets people around 30 gold. That would mean they’d need to make each fractal bracket award 6 gold to catch up.

What’s more, FRACTALS ARE REPETITIOUS. It’s the same small selection of fractals, whereas dungeon paths are far more varied.

If you thought doing fractal 50/40/30 every day was boring and leading to burnout, wait till you do some more of that to make up for dungeon tours.

I don’t get why those of us who crave instanced content get screwed over not only by not being able to farm map rewards equivalents in instanced content, but our rewards are time gated while the open world equivalents are not.

John Smith.4610:

Is the intention to deincentivize dungeons
Yes

That response is all I need to know that ANet are on the very wrong path.

You should NEVER deincentivise the use of content created in the game in such a way.

What you should do is redesign the dungeons to be worth the reward they offer.

Is it a long term,. high effort solution? Yes, but it’s a far better solution than just giving a giant “kitten you” to the dungeon community.

It’s an absolutely terrible design direction to simply abandon such a huge chunk of lore based, story-centric content just because fixing the issue requires effort and because you can’t think of any other way to incentivise fractals and raids over dungeons.

Fractals are seeing a revamp, why can’t dungeons?

They could’ve deincentivized dungeons by making other content more appealing but since they aren’t doing that it goes to show that ANet themselves lack confidence in their HoT content standing on it’s own merits.

If they had said the raw gold generation was the main problem, one could sympathize but clearly this is not the case and it simply looks like ANet is forcing dungeon runners to do other content by ruining dungeons.

There was no real need to gut dungeons, their rewards were already behind SW chest farming, tp flipping and selling fractals. Heck even gathering with a watchwork pick yields more nowadays.

Solo farming was some of the best content in GW1. It was semi-casual and took some skill. Different areas provided different levels of skill/rewards to play in. Nothing similar was provided in GW2 because of the push to be “social” that not everybody always wants.

However, GW2 dungeons evolved to fill a similar niche. The bonus chests were a great idea because they took away much of the drive to endlessly repeat and made a nice system where I could do 2 different paths or 10 different paths daily depending on what I felt like, then move on and always feel adequately rewarded.

Dungeons can be speed run, they can be YOLO run, they can be “kill everything” run. Dungeons can be run meta, simply 80’s only, laid back, teaching, learning all by simply stating what you are looking for in a LFG. They can be run with great friends in a raucous social way, with pugs being talkative, or silent like running with personal NPC’s.

Dungeons have varying lengths and varying roles for professions. Dungeons max requirement is lvl 80 and a set of exotic armor that can be reasonably earned through dungeon tokens. Dungeons perfectly fill a semi-casual, some skill required, niche.

Fractals are too short by themselves and too long for a full fractal run. Rewards feel paltry. Worthwhile rewards are only available to people that decide to dedicate themselves to higher level Fractals. Fractals are higher difficulty than dungeons, especially to get decent rewards. Fractals DO NOT fill a semi-casual, some skill required, niche.

Silverwastes is mind numbingly boring mash 1 or afk farming. It provides a farm only for the sake of farming. Silverwastes farming is casual, low skill. Silverwastes DOES NOT fill a semi-casual, some skill required, niche.

So ANet… WHY do you want to dis-incentivize (i.e. kill) the best semi-casual, some skill required, outlet in GW2?

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.

Nothing false about it at all, it clearly posits that some people like dungeons and hate fractals and for those people you’re nerfing their income.

Answer the question.

Why are you now following Blizzard’s approach of dictating what’s ‘fun’ and what isn’t and telling players to play some content or else quit because they’ll become unviable.

“Is the intention to deincentivize dungeons
Yes”

Your (Anet, not you personally) arrogance is breathtaking.

Averath.6283:

I get and fully understand that they do not want to develop dungeons anymore. That is their choice. I am disagreeing with their blanket chances that affect all the dungeons. As it is right now dungeons are not the best way to spend your time on GW2. SW is probably the best place to be. Dungeons offer you a decent reward, though this applies to a relatively small amount of paths across a fair number of dungeons. This means that a number of paths simply go ignored because they’re not economical to run.

I don’t care if they want to stop production on dungeons. I don’t care if they want to stop support for dungeons and just focus on fractals and raids. That stance, however, does not address the fundamental problem with dungeons. They’ve been ignoring the fundamental problem with dungeons for multiple years now, and this change will address none of those problems. All this change accomplishes is sweeping dungeons under the rug.

If they really wanted to change dungeons for the better, than they would treat them like a valid part of the game and make them balanced against the other parts of the game.

Dungeons are a casual 5-man experience. Fractals are a difficult 5-man experience. Raids are slated to be a very difficult 10-man experience. World event chains, such as the Silver Wastes, are a casual experience on a massive scale with a difficulty far lower than dungeons.

They should have Raids give the greatest rewards, which seems to be the intent. Fractals should give the best rewards for 5-man content. Dungeons should honestly be on-par with a casual experience, so that you can choose if you want to do 5-man content, or open world content. Right now they’re not even close, and they’re going to be kicking them down another rung with this change.

Perhaps the biggest spit in the face is that they’ve still ignored the disparity between time invested vs reward. You get a far greater reward for running shorter paths than you do running longer paths. This is the fundamental issue with dungeons that has gone ignored for years, and now they’ve pretty much announced that they don’t care at all.

Great precedent to set. A selling point of the original game was never addressed and simply abandoned. I can’t wait to see what they abandon from HoT. Will it be raids? Perhaps the “new and improved” fractals? We shall see, huh?

No, listen to what you are still saying. They aren’t interested in doing anything with dungeons anymore. Not just making new ones, they are through with them. Fixing them? Make them better? Hah. Don’t need to fix them if players are strongly discouraged from playing them.

And if they weren’t tied into the LW 1 lore they would close the doors and be done with them permanently but they can’t so all that is left is removing the motivation to play them daily, the gold reward. From now on only players who want to do story mode or run them for tokens (because they despise PvP as dungeon tokens were added to PvP for PvP players who despise PvE) for unique dungeon gear and for crafting legendary weapons.

Dungeons will become that “historic” ride at the amusement park that people go on once to say they rode it but is simply kept running to say it’s been there since it opened and was once the bee’s knees.

Watch this vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxLkfXwxLTs
at 16:24.

Replace the following phrases:

“what is the new tier of gear” -> “what is the new way of making gold”

“that ramps up the power curve” -> “that ramps up the grind curve” leaving a waste land of old contents that’s no longer challenging enough or rewarding enough…

is that what you want?

THANK YOU ANET, YOU FINALLY FIXED THE LFG-“I DO NOT RESPECT WHAT YOUR LOOKING FOR”-ISSUE FOR DUNGEONS!!!!

Maybe do this with fractals and raids too. When there is no reason to enjoy and run it over and over again, noone cares about having unmatching ppl in their party.
And maybe you even solved the bug-/exploit-issue. If noone cares about doing it in an efficient way, or more than once, they just could stay hidden for ever!

But please, stop trolling us! At least give us someone to talk with, who gives answers, not talking political rubbish.

Silent The Gray.3091:

Dinks.2478:

phys.7689:

Rising Dusk.2408:

I’m okay with reducing the gold output of dungeons, but I’m not okay with reducing the value of playing dungeons. Replace parts of the gold with T6 materials, lodestones, or something that matters to someone and can be sold to recoup some of the value. Don’t just take away the gold and give it nothing in return. A number of people play dungeons because they’re valuable even in spite of how old and unsupported they are; reducing their value will move those people elsewhere and that’s not good.

He answered that in mines, they dont want dungeons to be as desired an activity regardless

This leads me to believe it is exactly what I stated in another post about this. They are nerfing dungeons because they are afraid the new content won’t look appealing unless they finalize their abandonment of dungeons and make it not viable.

I think what they are trying to do is deflate the economy a bit and when we get to that deflated state, the 20g you get a day from dungeons will be way more gold than you can get doing anything else, so I think that’s where they are going with this and i’m okay with it, I love my dungeons just as much as anyone else, but I understand bringing value back to items, it’s not an easy task for them to do and I really am grateful that my 5 gold will go a lot farther

How will they be deflating the economy when you look at the amount of mats required for guilds to build guild halls and its content? The price of silk will become astronomical.

Will you please consider increasing token gain then?

It’s about time dungeon gold got nerfed.

It should be replaced with a generous amount of mats though, to keep dungeons profitable. If there is no real profit everyone will just avoid them, like the trash mobs that get skipped on every run.

Rare drops are a good idea too. Ultra rare weapons, mail carriers, minis etc. There should always be a chance of getting something exciting, even it’s a low chance. It’s like Tequatl – it may not give much gold for the time spent but there is some chance of getting an ascended chest or a unique skin.

Grunther ROTDPA.3478:

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

edited to add @Dashingsteel.3410

What? Dungeon running isn’t even the most profitable thing to do in the game with a group that’s very good at it, let alone pugging like most people do.

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

Are you seriously saying you don’t want players to play a part of the game?

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[/quote]

So in other words, if you don’t have thousands of gold in your wallet bank already, you may as well uninstall.

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

And ANet continues to try and shove Fractals down the playerbases’ collective throats.

do you see players seeking to earn main methods being through open world and tp trading
I don’t understand this one[/quote]

How do not understand this? Ashen is asking whether you think that more players will turn to TP flipping to make up their income shortfall.

At this point I’m beginning to think you want this game to fail.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

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.

But the new features they’re adding to them are dependent on HoT

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.

While I wasn’t one of them, there were a lot of people excited for the possibility of new dungeons when HoT was initially announced, and they are no doubt feeling abandoned right now. Furthermore people have been clamouring for revamps of dungeons since launch, and right now there are some unfulfilled promises right now on that front. So this disenfranchisement seems quite justified to me, the aspects of the game they like are being neglected.

Hi John,

will you take a look at the droprate of th dreamskins from aetherpath too? They allready vary between BWL skin and precursor prizes and thats only because very few players would like to have one. I am ok that they are supposed to be very rare skins, but i am afraid that these skins with less dungoenruns will become insane expensive even more than precursors are now.

i am really worried about the cloth prices, i still need 1000 silk to complete my ascended set and this change will make its price raise a lot

Hey John,

i got a couple of questions:
Since you nerf the dungeons hard how is a new player able to go into fractals or even raids? You need an ascended armour and well, we who all have one know how expensive it is.
How is a new player able to get the money for dunno more then 20 bolts of damask? That means you need 20*300 silk scraps => 6.000 and more. How is a new player able to get that amount of silk to build an ascended armour for just one char?

Another question: The fact, that you nerf the dungeons means, random players don’t run them in future no more. How is a new player able to get dungeonmaster – or like me dungeoneer? Only threw pvp?

I get the idea why you nerf it but there are dungeons where the reward is great – CoE or Arah. Where aetherpath get too less reward for my opinion.

Besides the fact that you force more on a content which player dont like play that much (look on lfg how much groups their are for dungeons & fractals) i get the point that you don’t have to design a whole story for a fractal. You focus on LA, the other areas of Tyria are not interesting.
Example:
CoF or CoA need an event chain to open the gates, same as arah. Since dugeons get less appealing players don’t do these events anymore => the maps get less popular and more empty.

What are your anwsers here? How can a noob join a fractal with no AR, and no much idea of the gameplay? Dungeons were the perfect spot for them to grow on exp and earn money to buy an asc. armour.

I feel at this point, they aughtta just remove all the psychology and smoke’n’mirrors and just offer rare mats for a gem cost. You want 100 Charged Lodestones? 1000 gems. You want 100 of each T6 mat? 2000 gems. You want a bolt of damask? 150 gems. I think this resolution would certainly allow us to skip right to the point, without worrying about what drops where and how often (if at all).

chrisnx.1674:

Hey John,

i got a couple of questions:
Since you nerf the dungeons hard how is a new player able to go into fractals or even raids? You need an ascended armour and well, we who all have one know how expensive it is.
How is a new player able to get the money for dunno more then 20 bolts of damask? That means you need 20*300 silk scraps => 6.000 and more. How is a new player able to get that amount of silk to build an ascended armour for just one char?

Another question: The fact, that you nerf the dungeons means, random players don’t run them in future no more. How is a new player able to get dungeonmaster – or like me dungeoneer? Only threw pvp?

I get the idea why you nerf it but there are dungeons where the reward is great – CoE or Arah. Where aetherpath get too less reward for my opinion.

Besides the fact that you force more on a content which player dont like play that much (look on lfg how much groups their are for dungeons & fractals) i get the point that you don’t have to design a whole story for a fractal. You focus on LA, the other areas of Tyria are not interesting.
Example:
CoF or CoA need an event chain to open the gates, same as arah. Since dugeons get less appealing players don’t do these events anymore => the maps get less popular and more empty.

What are your anwsers here? How can a noob join a fractal with no AR, and no much idea of the gameplay? Dungeons were the perfect spot for them to grow on exp and earn money to buy an asc. armour.

You mean people can’t get mats through laurels and the Silverwastes? Or gold? Who knew?

Vayne.8563:

chrisnx.1674:

Hey John,

i got a couple of questions:
Since you nerf the dungeons hard how is a new player able to go into fractals or even raids? You need an ascended armour and well, we who all have one know how expensive it is.
How is a new player able to get the money for dunno more then 20 bolts of damask? That means you need 20*300 silk scraps => 6.000 and more. How is a new player able to get that amount of silk to build an ascended armour for just one char?

Another question: The fact, that you nerf the dungeons means, random players don’t run them in future no more. How is a new player able to get dungeonmaster – or like me dungeoneer? Only threw pvp?

I get the idea why you nerf it but there are dungeons where the reward is great – CoE or Arah. Where aetherpath get too less reward for my opinion.

Besides the fact that you force more on a content which player dont like play that much (look on lfg how much groups their are for dungeons & fractals) i get the point that you don’t have to design a whole story for a fractal. You focus on LA, the other areas of Tyria are not interesting.
Example:
CoF or CoA need an event chain to open the gates, same as arah. Since dugeons get less appealing players don’t do these events anymore => the maps get less popular and more empty.

What are your anwsers here? How can a noob join a fractal with no AR, and no much idea of the gameplay? Dungeons were the perfect spot for them to grow on exp and earn money to buy an asc. armour.

You mean people can’t get mats through laurels and the Silverwastes? Or gold? Who knew?

No…. He means that in dungeons you earned money AND experience. If you gained experience in chest farming, are you very ready to do fractals 50 because you can press F?

Well dungeons always have been a convenient way of making gold and a little bit to rewarding but at the same time, does SW ( Chest farm is cheesy) really offer more risk? No it doesn’t, but new content gets preferred over older content and focus has cleary been shifting from dungeons to SW/LS/Fractals/Raids. If they truely want to promote it, nerfing dungeon rewards goes a long way.

If you look at wvw and pvp those do not even come close to the income dungeons offer to speed runners and alot of other activities in PVE also do not generate nearly the amount of gold dungeons do. From this perspective, does it really make sense to have outdated content that is on a dead end, which has received little attention since launch to be more rewarding than fractals/Living story updates/Raids/Open world maps.

I hope this opens up resources for more fractal/raid/map updates, quite frankly the dungeons have failed to deliver in gw2 ( admittedly due to arenanet ), but at the same time fixing dungeons and updating them might be to consuming at this point. Better move on to fractals/raids.

I do not doubt arenanet can fix dungeons and let them fulfill the same role as fractals/raids, but at the same time I think the bad name dungeons in gw2 have and the costs/resources it would take to fix them and bring new dungeons in existence compared to frequently updating fractals/raids, makes the latter more profitable for arenanet.

Ok lets be honest here…

This change isn’t about gold. It’s about money in real life.

Why would they nerf dungeons?
Because you don’t have to buy the expansion to do them.

Why would they buff fractals and raids in exchange?
Because you have to buy the expansion in order to play it. (At least Fractal 51-100)

And buy earning less money ingame people also tend to buy Gems more.
Congratz Anet! Great marketing strategies!

And to all the questions why they are nerfing dungeons and at the same time leaving SW Chestfarm untouched. These two ways to earn gold aren’t really competing with eachother since they work in different parts of PvE.
Dungeons are instancebased content. SW is open world.
So dungeons only directly compete with fractals and raids.

And now to my opinion on dungeons.

I only play gw2 for the PvE content since i don’t enjoy the PvP (mainly because there is only one gamemode and i find conquest boring) and also don’t find wvw too appealing.
I for myself like challenges. For example playing classes which take a lot of effort to play perfectly. And I always try to do things in the most optimal way. That’s why I don’t do open world for example. Being able to kill “worldbosses” by standing at 1200 range and only using AAs isn’t that difficult. And it doesn’t even make a big difference if I play my rotation optimal or spam AAs since there are 100 other people only pressing #1

Dungeons and Fractals are very fun content! You can always try out new strategies on how to finish the paths faster than before. Already the smallest mistake can mess everything up.
Therefore you will have to use different equiptment aswell as nourishments etc.

And now the problem.

If I don’t get enough of a reward from a dungeon to compensate for the items I bought for it and still having a small earning from it I am FORCED to do content I don’t like in order to keep doing what I like.

I will be able to do raids once per week and 5 Fractals each day.
And that would be it if the dungeon rewards will be nerfed hard. I could only play the game for 1.5 hours a day and have nothing else to enjoy. All dungeons together take 3-4 hours to complete and offer a lot of fun content and I don’t want them to cost more than I get for reward.

Conclusion:
I don’t appreciate the reward nerf but I would be ok with it if I’d be able to buy nourishments etc. and still having a small amount of cash left as earning.
Otherwise this game has nothing left to offer for me and I’d probably quit.

John Smith.4610:

Q.
Greetings, John! In the blog you mentioned there are a couple broken markets. Can you shed some light on which markets you consider broken and why?

A.
I can’t until after release for fear of making those markets go insane with speculation (moreso than they probably already are).

Q.
While I understand shifting the gold income from dungeons more towards fractals, I wonder, what will happen to stuff like Aetherpath. This is (in my eyes at least) a beautiful designed dungeon. The rewards already felt…. well… unrewarding, but with the upcoming changes, i fear noone is going to do that specivic path.
Also, were there plans about splitting the lost income of a party when they are doing them solo or duo (at some point, being discussed, on the table… you get me )
Also, congratulations on the legendaries, they have style!

A. To be honest, the details of content like that are more of a Colin question. Splitting rewards for missing members is tricky business, you definitely don’t want to rewards to become competitive between players, that’s why we don’t share gathering nodes or don’t have mob claiming, it’s not the spirit of what we do.

Q.
Are your efforts more aimed toward bringing down the value of over inflated items such as certain cloths or things like charged lodestones or is the goal to bring up under-utilized and over supplied materials like thick leather sections? or both?
I guess in short. Which one would you be manipulating more? supply or demand?

A.
there is a mix of both, but we swing more towards the latter than the former.

See what you did to thick leather sections
http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/19729

sicsempertyrannis.3510:

In this new age of MMOs, when the cash shop has replaced monthly subscriptions, you should assume that matters of the in-game economy, gold sales, etc. should take priority over player content.

Incentivizing HoT-exclusive content and encouraging gem purchases to acquire gold (as a means of circumventing increased grind requirements) are necessary measures to keep this product profitable.

This. Amazing how so many of you don’t get it.

Thatkitten Rat.1236:

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.

While I wasn’t one of them, there were a lot of people excited for the possibility of new dungeons when HoT was initially announced, and they are no doubt feeling abandoned right now. Furthermore people have been clamouring for revamps of dungeons since launch, and right now there are some unfulfilled promises right now on that front. So this disenfranchisement seems quite justified to me, the aspects of the game they like are being neglected.

I always held out for a dungeon revamp that never came among other things but I know BS when I see it and HoT is looking like a huge pile of it. I play three other MMOs that release new dungeon content every so often and one (FFXIV) that keeps all dungeons relevant regardless of your level. WoW does this too but its a crappier system as it keeps all of your OP abilities and is only available 1-2 times a month.

As for GW2 dungeons, eh, WoW (Challenge Mode and Mythic 5-mans), FFXIV (HM 4-mans). and TERA (like GW2 but with much better combat but too many 1-shot mechanics in dungeons like GW2) all have much harder dungeons and one of them keeps em coming at a decent pace (again FFXIV) and a random queue system that makes access easy at all times. This is what i always wanted from GW2 but the bonehead devs are stuck in 2004 era MMO land for whatever reason.

So yeah, I’ll stick with the other MMOs I already enjoy until Anet finally pulls their head from their kitten or they get less and less people logging on in HoT plus negative press.

Also to the people saying they’ll never give Anet another dollar after HoT, you do know you can ask for a refund on your purchase and wait things out. I took my money and slapped it down on the $125 Blade and Soul founder pack! Plays like a kungkittenGW2 with a better combat system and has much prettier skins to collect.

Very much appreciating the honest and simple answers.

Not a bad idea, to be honest. It is another way to make dungeon guilds focus on raids and fractals while not hurting those who mainly do SW for their daily gold gain.

Makes me wonder if it was decided to this because of players mainly doing content for the rewards or because there might actually be a lack of confidence in the quality of the new content.

Is SW (especially chest farm) considered too rewarding and are those rewards being shifted towards different content as well?

Spurnshadow.3678:

sicsempertyrannis.3510:

In this new age of MMOs, when the cash shop has replaced monthly subscriptions, you should assume that matters of the in-game economy, gold sales, etc. should take priority over player content.

Incentivizing HoT-exclusive content and encouraging gem purchases to acquire gold (as a means of circumventing increased grind requirements) are necessary measures to keep this product profitable.

This. Amazing how so many of you don’t get it.

Oh some of us get but don’t agree with it and I’ve seen other MMOs get bit in the kitten hard from their playerbase after they tried doing this. At that point, having a paid sub is a better option TBH. Like in FFXIV, I can easily get everything myself without ever hitting up the AH to level that job to level it does help having the gathering jobs leveled up too. Did I also mention that all of this just blows away the GW2 system completely and it more fun?

GW2 crafting feels like a how cheap Korean MMO does it.

To Mr Smith

Q: Why exactly don’t you want us to run dungeons?

Q: This has already been mentionned but could you please consider increasing the amount of token a dungeon run requires or removing the daily limits to dungeon rewards ? This is just to make it more reasonable to complete collections without PvP.

Q: Are jumping puzzles considered in the rewards shifting ? Not necessarily gold but this is a lovely activity that sadly is barely rewarding anything, I would love to have JP has an option to find specific things !

Question :
Will you rework fractals and the way it works ?
The 2 main issues with fractal are that they are too long (IRL constraints make it difficult to be there for a full hour sometimes) and agony resistance mechanism requires to have a specific set of ascended gear only for fractals (for WvW agony resistance is of no use).
It would be acceptable to nerf dungeon if a fractal run becomes shorter and if agony resistance becomes account bound like magic find.

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.

Because Dungeons aren’t popular. They were quite unpopular actually. Gold is popular.

No one likes dungeons, they like gold. They have stopped supporting dungeons so they are moving the rewards elsewhere.

If what you say is true and people like dungeons then there is no problem. They will keep running dungeons. If what I say is true then they will run whatever is given the gold rewards.

username.4932:

Question :
Will you rework fractals and the way it works ?
The 2 main issues with fractal are that they are too long (IRL constraints make it difficult to be there for a full hour sometimes) and agony resistance mechanism requires to have a specific set of ascended gear only for fractals (for WvW agony resistance is of no use).
It would be acceptable to nerf dungeon if a fractal run becomes shorter and if agony resistance becomes account bound like magic find.

They already did this blog, check back on the blog posts. Fractals are becoming 1 at a time that you pick instead of 4 random. Agony resist is gaining a consumable potion that you can use if you don’t want to bother getting a ton of agony resist for every character.

John Smith.4610:

Renarde.3251:

John, would you be able to answer if the dungeon rewards are just being brought in line with other content (namely future content), or if it’s going further than that? Also, was there any discussion about the rate of dungeon token earnings with this change?

Edit for clarity: You’ve said the dungeon token rate is staying the same, was there any discussion about increasing the amount of tokens you get per run to go along with the gold reduction?

I’m not prepared to answer the first one. I don’t believe we ever discussed changing the tokens from dungeons.

So what about the people that are working towards the dungeon gear achievements then? How am I supposed to complete my CoE achievements when people don’t play dungeons anymore? YOU GUYS SHOULD SERIOUSLY TALK ABOUT THE DUNGEON TOKENS or some kind of fix. (How about making the skins/achievements avaliable if you already completed all paths (a bunch of times or just once)
You people should not change stuff without thoroughly considering everything that a change implies
(PSA, I don’t care about gold rewards or other dungeon rewards, all I want is to be able to finish the achievements I’ve started working towards)

I don’t actually see this as a nerf to dungeons. The basic premise revolves around soldier and dire gear. Inscriptions and Insignias for soldier and dire gear are only available reliably from dungeons or dungeon paths in PvP. Each one of those items is worth about 2.5 gold per salvage. If those materials become less because less people are running dungeons then the price for those materials will increase. Since Fractals and Raids are focused on Ascended gear which are based off the T6 inscriptions and insignias then dungeons will always be required since those are the only reliable ways to gain that gear(soldier/dire).

Simply put, unless they have changed how soldiers and dire are acquired reliably, dungeons will be the ONLY way to get those items and people who farm dungeons will be the only game in town for supplying those items. It merely means that you will be doing runs for the materials and not the gold itself. So I would say that the 1 gold you might lose from a dungeon run may be made up for when you sell your T6 soldier/dire equipment.

I’m not an expert on anything but here’s my interpretation of the dungeon changes:

Smith said that the goal is to deincentivize dungeons. That’s not removal or necessarily a death sentence. Currently dungeons are a huge source of income for people. They are such a large source of income that some people feel obligated to do dungeons for the sole purpose of being able to gain appreciable money. Anet’s goal here to stop this feeling of obligation and spread wealth-gain ability to other parts of the game.

I know that personally I dislike how dungeons are currently done (I hate speedruns, zerk meta, etc. and would actually do dungeons if these things weren’t present), and the reason for these things lies in the fact that doing dungeons is so profitable. If the wealth were moved elsewhere, then folks who actually enjoy dungeon content and its unique rewards will continue to do dungeons, but people who dislike dungeons and only do them as a source of income will stop.

That’s what I interpret “deincentivize” to mean.

ArenaNet choose a long time ago to concentrate their resources on a few specific areas. Dungeons are not one of those areas. Now their economist gives an honest answer on a question about dungeons and this topic derailed completely. It is suppose to be about the economic changes of which the dungeon part is only a (very) small part.

A short economy lesson (fitting for this thread): ArenaNet is a business. They want to make money. They have to pay their employees. They have to satisfy their stakeholders. So they need us players to pay money for the game. Without a subscription fee they need other sources of income. Gems are one source, selling an expansion is another one. So they want us to buy the expansion. So they are going to spend their resources mostly on HoT and HoT related content. So they are pushing us slowly in the direction of HoT. They have ideas about keeping existing content attractive. But only the existing content they want to focus (resources) on. Dungeons are not part of that.

Dungeon running for gold will probably be a thing of the past after HoT releases. That will probably stop most speed dungeon running. Speed runs in dungeons is content that ArenaNet probably doesn’t really like (and maybe want to get rid of).

For players that do dungeons for another reason than getting gold (fast) the change will probably have a negative effect. That is a shame. But without infinite resources ArenaNet has to make choices.

As an economist to subtract rewards and deincentize dungeons is a simple solution, that obviously a lot of people dislike.

What I would prefer to see is that the developers somehow come up with a solution as to keep the dungeons alive and relevant to those that love this part of the game.

Some ideas I brainedstorm was maybe add more EXP to the rewards, this will make new players who are not level 80 be more likely do more dungeons as they will hear it’s good exp and help old and level 80 players earn EXP towards their masteries. (Obviously for the Central Tyria Masteries)

Another idea is instead of adding more loot or certain materials (as that might also effect the economy) add in more tokens while reducing the chance to salvage items from dungeon gear. I’m pretty sure is that if we increased tokens people would buy more dungeon gear and than salvage for mats thereby shifting the economy but instead if we reduce the amount of mats you salvage from token bought gear the mats would not be very affected in value.

In the case for making feel like you earned the tokens to craft legendaries you could just up the amount of tokens you are required to purchase dungeon gifts to craft legendaries.

You could also have a daily lockout of gold from dungeons like only 5 gold a day or something like that

My last idea is provide maybe more aesthetic rewards, and no i mean beyond just the dungeon armor and weapons. Like you need dungeon tokens to buy the gifts and offerings of the dungeons to craft Dungeon Guild Hall items like maybe an Ascalonian Statue ,or a Subject Alpha’s Broken Containment Cell, or maybe a Piece of Zhaitan’s Horn or one off his undead tounge snake things. I personally would want a Sapling/Seed of the Nightmare Tree.

The main point is to not just abandon Dungeons but instead make them better, maybe not as good or better compared to Raids and Fractals but in order to pay tribute to those that love playing Dungeons and those loyal to our game.

Spurnshadow.3678:

sicsempertyrannis.3510:

In this new age of MMOs, when the cash shop has replaced monthly subscriptions, you should assume that matters of the in-game economy, gold sales, etc. should take priority over player content.

Incentivizing HoT-exclusive content and encouraging gem purchases to acquire gold (as a means of circumventing increased grind requirements) are necessary measures to keep this product profitable.

This. Amazing how so many of you don’t get it.

Its amazing how some of you don’t understand the basic economics of reducing liquid gold from a single part of the game world. He made it very clear that overall player income isn’t going down but they needed to make slack so that new content can be rewarding without massive inflation. “New age of MMOs” makes you sound like an elitist kitten who thinks they alone see the truth. Take off the tinfoil please.

If some of you have never played games with terrible inflation then I can forgive the ignorance but any of you “veteran” gamers should be ashamed for going chicken little on a change like this. Look at inflation in other game worlds and how quickly people have to resort to bartering with other in game items because the currency of the world is useless.

I am hard pressed to think of a single other persistent game where the gold generation hasn’t gotten so out of hand that even basic items start costing thousands or millions of in game gold. Look at FF14, a competently made game, the in game currency there is borderline worthless and EVERYONE complains about the insane prices on goods because inflation is so high. How about WoW? Vanilla gold had meaning and even a couple gold was a lot of money, now players sling tens of thousands around like its nothing.

Also, if you think for a second about the lack of sub you realize that it leads to people taking a break and coming back to the game so you have to KEEP INFLATION LOW so that when these players return THEIR GOLD STILL HAS VALUE.

So basically if you liked to earn some extra gold by doing a quick dungeon, you can say good bye to it…awesome… Instead we are forced to play fractals where you need asceded equip for AR, or farm open world maps with zerg…which is of course really fun.

Thank you <3 i guess, i will rather stay poor

John Smith.4610:

Donari.5237:

Averath.6283:

What incentives will players have to run dungeons after these changes go live? The entire game is based around doing what gets you to your goal fastest, and as of right now gold is the end-all-beat-all. If dungeons do not bring players to this goal, what incentive is there to play them??

Hmm … for fun? That’s why I and my friends run them. We pull everything, kill it, banter on Mumble, do as many paths of whatever we feel like and then we stop when we’re tired. It’s certainly not a huge gold source for me and I still have fun doing it.

Question to John Smith, though: Other than tokens, will anything drop in dungeons at all? Tonight’s casual fun run in CoE got my bags choked with things (usually I never see the Inventory is Full message on my dungeon/fractal alt), and I salvaged them for a lot of mats and sold off a few copper of minor runes and the like. Will we now be ending dungeon runs with bags as clear as when we entered?

Dungeons will still drop things as well as they will still have some gold, they will just have much less gold.

Edit meant to say still and said stop, sorry.

Frankly: eff you. Doing a couple quick paths is the only way I can make a couple gold in the limited play time I have. Everything else requires more people and time.

This game needs to be renamed “GuildTradingPost”.

With the current rate of the inflation of items, i can’t see how causal and new players will every catch up, dungeons was always a good way to keep up with the inflation. So my questions are: 1)How do you plan to counter this without forcing people to do fractals, raids champ/Event farms and SW chest farm? 2) Will the rich get richer and is the poor going to have a hard time to keep up?

So…. basically what this thread is telling me is that if I want to finish my Dungeon Master title, I need to do so over the next few days (on both accounts) because after HoT, dungeons are pretty much going to be dead. Lovely.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

So…. basically what this thread is telling me is that if I want to finish my Dungeon Master title, I need to do so over the next few days (on both accounts) because after HoT, dungeons are pretty much going to be dead. Lovely.

I doubt this very very much. Drama does love drama but get serious, people will still be doing dungeons.

censord.8679:

With the current rate of the inflation of items, i can’t see how causal and new players will every catch up, dungeons was always a good way to keep up with the inflation. So my questions are: 1)How do you plan to counter this without forcing people to do fractals, raids champ/Event farms and SW chest farm? 2) Will the rich get richer and is the poor going to have a hard time to keep up?

Not sure you know how inflation works. Adding gold to the game through dungeons makes it go up while adding mats that you sell on the TP makes it go down. So this is actually a positive change for new and returning players because it will keep their items and gold valuable. This game has seen very low inflation and even some deflation over the last year on core goods. I really wish people would go look at prices over time on gw2spidy before coming here and shouting about rampant inflation and gold farm.