So, apparently Anet has added a timer to dungeons to prevent you from beating them in under 15 minutes. They have also made it so that your rewards will decline if you clear more than two of the same dungeon paths per hour.

I don't play PvE so I don't know if speed clearing was a big problem, but it seems to me like they are punishing people for being too good and are creating artificial grind.

How do the dungioneers feel about this?

I haven't run any instances yet so I know next to nothing about how they work, but I agree with your evaluation of it.

Looks like no more 10-15 minute CoF runs, at least not running the same path over and over.

On one hand, I think it's fine that Anet wants to stop people from running the same explorable path over and over again. But, on the other hand, armor sets still cost so many tokens that the explorable runs are still necessary, and now those 60+ runs to get the necessary tokens are going to take more time.

Based on the difficulty of and time required to complete the dungeons I've run I'd be extremely surprised if sub-15 minute runs are legitimate. I'd hazard a guess that ANet aren't trying to 'punish people for being too good' or 'create artificial grind' but are instead trying to clamp down on cheats and exploits.

I didnt hear about the timer being 15 mins but heres the quote from jon peters regarding the change. It seems they needed to do a little bit of balancing to the story mode missions.

Hey all, it is my fault the updates to those 3 dungeon chains did not get into to the notes. There is a lot going on right now and as we establish our patch process sometimes things will slip through the cracks. I wanted to shed some light on the dungeon speed clear stuff as well. You should not see any diminished returns unless you.

1) Run the same exact chain over twice in a row
2) Complete multiple dungeons in 30 minutes or less each.

We also reduced the rewards of completing story mode, once you have already completed it, because the rewards for story mode were never intended to be a high as they were.

At this time, dungeons should one of the most efficient ways to level and get gold, and it is not our intention to make them feel like a grind. This is a very large game, and we have a lot of people playing it in many different ways. Right now we are working hard to make sure there are not any ways for players to circumvent the normal rewards in the game and then we will be able to look at the actual rewards and make sure they require a reasonable amount of investment.

Dungeons are meant to be difficult and we will continue to update them to try and reach a point where the time invested to XP/Gold/Tokens is similar for each dungeon. Some right now are just too easy to complete while others may be too hard. Moving forward we will try and post more clear change notes for those dungeons we do fix.

Thanks for your feedback, we really appreciate your desire to help us keep improving on the game.

Jon

Even the really easy runs like CoF route 2 are going to take most groups over 15 minutes (I think about 20 is more accurate), so I'm thinking the timer is more for stuff like what people are doing in City of Arah where groups will farm a single boss in a certain route over and over, allowing them to get tokens every few minutes.

As far as the diminishing returns, I think that's a terrible idea. First they put a system in place that requires you to run a single dungeon over and over for tokens/lodestones for your legendary, armor, etc. Now they're saying that we have to run them over and over, but not too much! If I want the lodestones for my Sunrise, I need to run CoE, the parts don't drop anywhere else, just as I need to do a bunch of runs of AC to get my Gift of Ascalon. I think WoW's approach is closer to ideal, make the currency from the dungeons universal, and make it so you can only do the instances X times per day. That way, I still need to put the work in to get my goodies, but I don't need to run CoE until my eyes bleed, I can do any of the content.

When questing in the final Charr area, Citadel of Flames speedruns were all the rage. Did one out of curiosity. Took us 25 minutes instead of the 12-15 minutes 'pros' would have spent on it, because two of us were new to that explorable path. It's a legit run - but it's typical MMO-gamer OCD retardedness to run a single path over and over again, because its the most efficient way to earn the shinies - to the point where I look at CoF-skins as a mark of shame (not really, because at some point I would have done my share of it, but damn that's dumb).

Anyways - good on ArenaNet to promote proper gameplay. I miss that in many developers. Having a clear vision for their design. Sticking to their guns. Not letting people play how they want, but pushing them into playing how their designers want want them to. Actively imposing the experience.

Wish DICE would bring the kibosh down on all the dumbass custom rules and settings people are running on their servers - at least on ranked servers. Guess that's just not in their DNA.

I think they are trying to slow the progression to 80 if only a little bit. I think they have a time frame in their mind that they want to be 0 to 80 at fastest grind and they also have a timeframe for minutes to gold. Its all about tweaking to get that model of what they feels right. Which i guess is cool.

@jesterroyal said:

I think they are trying to slow the progression to 80 if only a little bit. I think they have a time frame in their mind that they want to be 0 to 80 at fastest grind and they also have a timeframe for minutes to gold. Its all about tweaking to get that model of what they feels right. Which i guess is cool.

There's literally no difference between the leveling game and the endgame. And the dudes doing speedruns are all level 80. It's not about XP, it's about tokens for shiny skins, and players playing only one out of like 30+ explorable paths through the dungeons in GW2.

ArenaNet doesn't want players to do just one thing over and over again. Grind out their shinies on the path of least resistance, instead of playing all the dungeon content they built. This measure should push people to play more diverse content.

There is a severe difference to in game buying power at level 40 and level 80. I think these tweaks can be traced back to cash shop sales and trying to stabilize the economy. At 80 I know i can get myself a bank slot in a week or less of hard work, however, at 50 I just don't have the ability to make that kind of cash and I'm way more tempted to buy one for real money. If i cared about that sort of think and could power level though 20 minute dungeon runs I might. I imagine that's what they are attempting to curb. But, I'm no economist so that's just my thoughts on it. I also remember hearing something in the lincolncast that dungeons could net a silver per minute in some cases which is insane.

@jesterroyal said:

There is a severe difference to in game buying power at level 40 and level 80. I think these tweaks can be traced back to cash shop sales and trying to stabilize the economy. At 80 I know i can get myself a bank slot in a week or less of hard work, however, at 50 I just don't have the ability to make that kind of cash and I'm way more tempted to buy one for real money. If i cared about that sort of think and could power level though 20 minute dungeon runs I might. I imagine that's what they are attempting to curb. But, I'm no economist so that's just my thoughts on it. I also remember hearing something in the lincolncast that dungeons could net a silver per minute in some cases which is insane.

Caudecus's Manor Story Mode runs are probably the best for farming XP and gold. You can easily get anywhere from 30-40 silver per run (more if you get a rare item to sell on the TP), and each run would take no more than 15-20 minutes. I've heard they've made this dungeon significantly tougher now in Story Mode, so I don't know if that is still the case.

Here's my cynical take - the reason that it takes so many tokens to get that Exp mode gear is purely to keep people playing. If that isn't working as well as intended due to the ease/speed with which the mode can be completed, people need to be slowed down.

ANet may say they don't want people grinding, ever. If this were the case, ideal or near-ideal dungeon gear would be acquired by running every path of every exp mode once. Even adjusting for the actual number of runs needed for each piece of gear,t hat is not even a remotely reasonable strategy due to set bonuses, and that's ignoring how weird you'd look in that mismatched outfit.

This isn't a complaint, really. It seems completely possible to get endgame-viable gear by screwing around, earning gold and karma in events and such, and buying your gear. These grinds are built to give people who want to go the extra mile something to work on. ANet's transparent hypocrisy on the subject of endgame grinding is pretty annoying to me, though.