Last night ArenaNet pushed through the most recent set of patches which made a few changes to the way dungeon rewards work. This morning the forums were ablaze with comments and feedback to these particular changes as it greatly affected the way that some users were using the dungeons.

In order to straighten everything out Jon Peters took to the forums to quell the fears and woes of the public:

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

Later in the same thread he clarified further and wrote,

Let me clarify the change a bit since not everyone understands it.

If you run the exact same chain twice in a row you will have your rewards cut. This means you can bounce back and forth between 2 different chains, even in the same dungeon without ever hitting this change. This change is made to encourage people to try different chains.

If you speed clear dungeons at a rate of more than 2/ hour, and continue to do that for some time your rewards will slowly begin to degrade. It doesn’t kick in after running a single dungeon and it doesn’t immediately zero out rewards.

Finally we reduced the value of repeating the story mode, because they are built to be easier and we want to encourage those repeating dungeons to run explore mode.

So for all you dungeon runners out there just switch up your runs a little bit and you can still farm them to your hearts content. See you in game!