Guild Wars 2

First off, I really enjoy fractals! Second, I fall somewhere between “casual” and “hardcore” on the gaming scale. I have maybe 300 hours in-game since launch and try to play 4-5 nights/week, usually about 2 hours or so. I typically play with a small group of friends I know in real life.

Problem: I enjoy fractals and want to play them, but I don’t always want to play fractals for the ~2 hours it takes for my group to complete them. (Yes, we’re n00bs because it takes us that long. Fine. We’ve only just gotten through a first run of all 9.)

Solution: Fractal Free Play mode. You play only a single fractal – you choose the fractal and the level you’d like to play (I’m agnostic on whether you level-limit based on minimum completion or not). This does not advance your fractal level completion.

This gives you a way to say, “Hey, let’s run Uncategorized quick!” Or, “I have a new build, can we try it in Urban Battleground?”

For those of us who enjoy fractals but may not always be able to devote a couple hours to them, this would be amazing.

(To answer a potential question that might come up: why can we not just agree to play one then quit? Usually my group is 4 real-life friends and a PUG. It’s hard enough to find PUGs who want to do low-level content as-is, but saying, “Oh, we’re not even going to finish” makes it that much worse.)

I think the randomness is part of what they wanted when they designed it, so choosing the fractal may be counter to that, although from where I sit since you can choose what path you take in any other dungeon then why not?

I like the idea. They’d probably have to take appropriate steps to keep it from being exploited for farming, but aside from that the only real issue I can see with it is that it might make it tougher to put together PUGs for people who want to do a set of “real” fractals.

On randomness: I’d concede this point, and I’m actually okay if they want to enforce random fractals.

On farming: this is perhaps true, but aren’t the daily rewards the real prize in fractals? With this setup, you wouldn’t get your daily rewards, so I assume farmers would steer clear. (I’m still at low levels, so excuse my noobishness.)

For PUGs: this is perhaps true…

Really, to me, this solves a problem that myself (and I think lots of others are having): I have an hour or so, what should we do? Dungeons were already an answer for a longer time-frame (again, my group seems to take 2-3x as long as everybody else, but we’ve only finished 7 or 8 dungeon paths to this point…)