For all those complaining about stale dungeons: from a beta player perspective

[Shurrikhan]

So why on earth would they change the dungeon format and formula AT ALL when speed runners always dictate the path, pace and course of the dungeon runs?

"Speedrunners" dictated one and only one path because one and only one path was meaningfully incentivized, especially for reuse.

"Speedrunners" dictated one and only one pace because there's no challenge available by which to make any other pace remotely worthwhile.

And outside of the path taken, there is no "course" of any dungeon beyond whatever gets you to the different bosses to then kill the bosses... because that and only that is how any dungeon has been created, (worthless) side-path treasure chests or no.

* Note also here that "speedrunners" is, for all intents and purposes, equal simply to anyone who does a given dungeon more than just a couple times.

All these problems are ones that initial design and narrow reactions to feedback caused.

You promote what your design incentivizes. You increasingly create the situation you give precedent to.

Given that the community would have to specifically rail against what was incentivized in order not to end up there and would have to be held accountable for every Monkey's Paw interpretation of their feedback when protesting the direction that trend was taking, it doesn't seem reasonable to lay blame for how things ended up primarily on the community.

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If the developers wanted players to use the side-paths, they should have made the rewards they give worthwhile to all runners of said dungeon (not just crafters attempting to do unnecessary old recipes just for the completionism of it). If they wanted people not to use the same path all the time, they should have offered something to randomize things. If they wanted dungeons to be more than just a matter of taking the minimum path between static objectives, they should have made the objectives or the areas between them less static.

Instead, they took the "We don't like how wasteful the explorables of each dungeon have become and how singularly 'go go go' each dungeon's pace has turned" by ensuring there were no explorables at all and that there would never be a situation for which one couldn't maximally 'go go go' (by setting up walls at intervals that'd prevent any real danger in pull size). ...That hardly seems a result you can blame player feedback for.