I’d like to start this off by saying that I find Guild Wars 2 to be one of the most enjoyable experiences in an MMO I’ve had since WoW and that I agree with most of what Arena.net are trying to do. I personally believe A.Net are by most accounts trying to do right to their players and though some things, especially the dungeons, need polishing and balancing, I have faith that they’ll get it done some time down the road. What concerns me at the moment is the Armor set rewards and what Arena.Net are expecting players to do to get them.
At the moment, to get a full set of dungeon armor, you will be required to gather 1380 tokens unique to each explorable dungeon. For completing an explorable dungeon you will get 30 for your first time and 20 on your next run, so you’ll be looking at roughly 65 or so runs to complete a set. And that’s a hell of a lot of runs. You can reduce the monotony a bit by rotating between the three explorables but the problem comes from some paths being broken or being overly tuned.
When something like the Magg run in CoF are discovered, and some say exploited, to get the gear quickly, A.Net’s reaction is to hotfix it by making it more difficult to farm. But I think this ignores the root of the problem; that being people having to actually farm the dungeons in the first place. I understand that A.Net wants the armor sets to be a symbol of achievement for completing content within the game, but forcing players to repeat dungeons over and over isn’t a sign of skill or ability (beyond stubbornness and an abundance of free time) and the exorbitant amount of tokens required to get the sets will always funnel players to the path of least resistance.
At this point, dungeons are undoing a lot of what I thought was one of the key principles behind the Guild Wars 2; removing the grinding treadmill in place of a fun and rewarding experience. The worst part is that this is seemingly intentional as they removed the dungeon helm from completing story mode in beta and instead now giving players generic helms. Evidence of this can be found at the end of the video at the end.
Now instead of getting it as a nifty reward for completing story you have to farm 180 tokens in explorable. It’s what I’d consider the opposite of what should have been done; instead of offering players meaningful rewards, they instead make their players grind for the sets. And to me that doesn’t feel like Guild Wars 2 is about. From my perspective, players should be rewarded for completing explorables, which are meant to be the most difficult PvE content within the game.
Now I understand that A.Net want people to keep playing the game and don’t want people blowing through the dungeons and getting bored once they have all the sets, but surely there must be a better way to do it then the grinding system currently in place. I know there will always people that will press on regardless of how painful the token system is at the moment (I’m one of them), but I think it just hurts the game a great deal to do it this way and considering how talented a team A.Net has it’s really disappointing if they cannot find a better method.