Guild Wars 2

Hey there!

So I was just thinking on ways to improve the Fractals system, and my friends and I discussed some ways that we feel could be pretty awesome… ‘Mist Jumping’, or the question of “what if you could go back in time in Guild Wars 2?”, in a sense?

What if it were possible to use the Fractals system as a lore-friendly way to explore older temporary content, such as previous holiday events (at least the ones that aren’t going to return in the same manner as their initial release) and Living Story content that is no longer available or in existence? You could enter the Mistlock Observatory at any time with a group or solo to speak with new NPCs — perhaps Dessa’s assistants? — to access instanced versions of say, Lion’s Arch, or solo and group instances of the Molten Facility or the Wintersday puzzles and games.

The cost could be simple: while you can rerun solo and group LS/holiday/temporary content to your heart’s content to relive the experience, gain achievements you missed or simply have fun, the drawback could be that all itemized gains (such as drops) would be account or character bound, or perhaps replaced by karma gains instead of direct monetary gains. I also feel we shouldn’t be able to earn unique items that were only available when the events were live, such as minis and cosmetic gear, but that is debatable.

This could renew the use of some older and unused materials, as well; Halloween and Dragon Bash candy could be made useful at any time of the year, increasing their resale value and the desire for players to stock up more of unique materials when the actual event rolls around.

One striking example comes to mind for this: City of Heroes. Maybe you loved the game, maybe you didn’t, maybe you never played it; but chances are you’ve heard of a system they had in place known as Ouroboros. The Ouroboros system let you run through older content for achievements and experiences that were simply no longer available the traditional way, letting players gain ‘badges’ (achievements they missed and sorely needed) in a way that was unobtrusive to the rest of the gameplay and did not invalidate current or future holiday events and content updates.

On another tangent entirely, perhaps the concept of the Mistlock Observatory as more than just as a gateway into FOTM runs could be expanded upon. The devs could perhaps utilize the system as a way to allow players to create personal content such as homes, guild halls, social instances and player-created missions! (But all that is a tangent for another time, so I won’t bother you by ranting and raving about that topic.)

What do you think? Would you like to see an enhancement to Fractals? What would you change in this idea, if anything?

Very nice.

As soon as I started reading I was going to saw that you had to be careful with something like this. I don’t care if everyone gets everything (as long as they work for it), but doing this could be seen as a small slap to someone who was there when the event first ran. But obviously, this is a game, and people have real life commitments. You could almost argue the same thing about the achievement points, but I don’t see that big of a problem with it. Also this could work for all of the instances but less so for other things that were introduced. (For example, there’s be no easy way to bash 300 piñatas in LA with this).

One detriment to your idea, unless Anet reverses their decisions, is that they remove unfinished achievements after the LS is over because a bunch of people complained about seeing something not finished.

Another may be how they play to do repeated events and their current idea for fractals. We won’t know until SAB next update and Halloween two months from now how they are going to handle repeat events (SAB for a “bring back” anytime event, and Halloween for the first repeated holiday). They can have only new achievements, new achievements with the old, or only the old ones. So your idea may not be necessary. I remember in gw1 that the following year after a big event happened, the NPCs recreated it and you could relive it if you wanted, while new things were also introduced.

So that may take care of most of the repeated events, but that still leaves things like F&F, both Southsun events, and others I’m most likely missing. Of those, they’re bringing the AR and the FF dungeons to fractals (but who knows if the achievements will still be there or not, or if they will just have a single fractal achievement associated with them), and things like Southsun (besides the dungeons) would be impossible to redo on a small scale.

If I came off negative, sorry. I do like the idea, it would just need to be carefully executed.

I know one thing I would like, that’s related to your idea, but not necessarily a fractal implementation (though it could be). I’d like to be able to watch any cut scene when I have some free time. I’d love to be able to watch personal story, dungeon, and the LS cut scenes again in one nice location, (I’d go for home instance, but fractals could work too).

Another thing I’d love, is the ability to redo personal story missions. I’m not saying to gain the reward again, but some missions were just fun to play, or had good NPC quotes.