Update: Mythic may have some features in place to make their public dungeons a little more sane, much like their public quests. This post has been made without experiencing them first-hand, so I'm open to retracting depending on how it works once I've seen it personally. Regardless, I dislike the idea, why bandaid something that works so poorly when there are already better options?

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Public Dungeons suck, that is all.

Or at least, that should be all.

I'd have thought that this antiquated design in MMOs would have been long buried. a throwback from the early days of UO and EQ. Whether it's on a PvP server or PvE, making a dungeon open as a public space is a welcome invitation to the worse kinds of asshattery. Didn't we have enough of that already?

Anyone who's experienced one shouldn't need me to list the numerous idiotic activities that public / open dungeons attract, so I won't bother.

But Funcom revived this tired concept and made some public dungeons in Age of Conan. It was a huge mess and a low point for AoC and that's saying something. Now apparently Mythic has also left some of their Warhammer dungeons as open spaces. What were they thinking?

I can guess the intention, to have a bit of extra crazyness on 'Open RvR' servers. But shouldn't the designated RvR capture areas be the focal point for skirmishes, not some cheap ganking while players are occupied with a dungeon boss / mob?

If they've got to balance these dungeons for the extra sorts of 'activity' they'll have, then the encounters won't be well balanced for a standard 3-6 man team. That's a big disappointment to me, because the small team tailored stuff is the best fun I have in these games.

Note: There's a huge difference between Warhammer's Public Quests and a dungeon that's just left open. Public Quests have inclusion so that all players can participate and benefit, they're completely designed around having crowds go at them.

I'm really hoping they don't have much in the way of these open dungeons in tier 4, that would be a huge disappointment for me and such a waste of content that could be great otherwise.