Guild Wars 2

Getting a group for FOTM is incredibly hard. The variety in difficulties has made an unnecessary challenge out of finding a group. I propose this —

You still level up in difficulty, as long as all members are in the same bracket. For example, the brackets would look like this:

FOTM 1-4
FOTM 5-9
FOTM 10-14

So if someone was level 3 and they were playing with a level 2, they would still be able to advance their difficulty potential to 4 at the end. This eliminates larges amounts of individuals on slightly different difficulties, while also preventing people from abusing the system to rank up in lower difficulties (IE a level 15 playing a level 9 difficulty to avoid agony).

Thoughts?

I think it’s difficult to see any long-term patterns of behavior: the dungeon has only been out a week, so there are obviously going to be differences between the people who do nothing but FotM, frequent-players who do other stuff besides FotM, and casual players (who only play a few hours each week). It’s also a holiday weekend in the US, affecting who is available and when.

With those caveats, I think it would still be worthwhile to make it easier for people to find groups:

• Expand the potential pool by creating a global LFG tool — there are lots of threads for that already.
• Add more incentives for high-rank FotMs to play in lower ranks. (One such incentive already exists: you can get a daily at each major step: 10-19, 20-29, …)
• Reduce the time commitment to complete a cycle (e.g. by allowing people to stop overnight and restart). This would allow casual players who team up to finish one fractal each night, instead of being force to play for longer (yes, some players can finish very quickly, but I don’t think that’s true of most people, especially not most casual players).