Deathpanel, while I didn’t have the time to get back to your first dismissal of my response, I do now. While I understand that you, as a WvW player primarily (from your forum posting history), may not care as much as we on this subforum do, dungeons are the main source of income for a large variety of the player base. They are a very important part of the economic “middle class” in GW2, and are very important based on that alone. They are also a very good skill determiner in PvE. There is no zerg to save you, and you need to do more than spam “1” the whole way.
I’m going to assume you’re intelligent and are not going to bring up the whole “stack in the corner” argument.
Now, according to your argument that “they are not supposed to be run for the sake of running”, I could see how you would think this. However, if the developers agreed with this assessment, Hobby Dungeon Explorer would not be implemented in achievements, and people would not pay me hundreds, if not thousands, of gold to buy Arah p4 off of me or my friends for their Dungeon Master title.
I, and other people in this forum, are not “fringe cases”. We have an 866 reply thread for teaching dungeons. On a regular basis, I take people through all 4 paths of Arah, even if they’ve done it before, just to learn how to do it better. My weekend Arah tour is always full, and more and more people want to join it every week. If you put up an LFG for any dungeon, it is filled within seconds (or sub 3 minutes if you’re off-peak or have stringent requirements).
Suffice to say, dungeons are a priority in a large percentage of the players’ minds. This does not mean, however, that ANet will support them. You also have to look at the artistic direction that the team is going in, and that is Living Story. They WANT to push that out there, as they think it will bring new people into the game at a much quicker pace than a new dungeon. It is an artistic decision, not something that is motivated by money. If they were motivated by money alone, the whole structure of the game itself would be different, and there’d be capes in the gem store (I’d pay a lot of money for a cape).
Anet went the direction that living story was more important than anything else. It’s not the status quo, it’s just their choice as a business.
