Guild Wars 2

Just some points to consider in relation to proposals so far:
1. Fractals are a skill based activity it is acceptable to leave people behind (in terms of difficulty).
2. Fractal relics and Pristine fractal relics are not level gated and by themselves would not make a good choice for giving access to high end fractal rewards, including shards in the required recipe would help alleviate.
3. The levels and AR are there to allow a tiered system, allowing you to easily gate the rewards which is helpful.
4. Living world items are once off obtainable for those who were there, like once off events you find in most MMO’s stop asking for them again just because you want it.
5. Fractal Weapons are rarer than legendaries in some cases, keep that in mind when suggesting a more consistent method for obtaining them (i.e keep the difficulty up).
6. When suggesting something do this test: Can a person repeatedly run a level 1 fractal end up with the same stuff as a person running level 50 fractals, if the answer is yes then it kind of defeats the purpose of fractals.

Improvement of existing fractals:
I think it fits to throw this all in together in one proposal, since most are small things.

Proposal Overview
A few points which would improve the existing fractal experience and bring some of them on par with each other

Goal of Proposal

• Lengthen Swamp fractal
• Shorten Dredge fractal
• fix problems
• make rewards not random

Proposal Functionality

• Swamp fractal: I think there should be a corridor after the first part with the lights, before the actual boss. The reason should be obvious, the fractal is much shorter compared to other fractals, which is why almost every group just chooses this as beginning fractal making the other tier 1 fractals useless. Also this is one of the fractals there you are fightning almost no mobs, so including a corridor with enemies whould increase drop-chance for mist shard materials.
• Dredge fractal: I realised that I don’t need to write about this again, there are already many good proposals for this here in the thread.
• Problems: There are some things I would like to see fixed. For example the maw still targets pets and minions, which is really annoying, so could you perhaps program the AI that these are not included in the death-ray targeting? Also I discussed this a lot with people ingame and it seems that the shock-wave achievement of the molten-flame bosses is bugging and it would lessen frustration if this was fixed, since getting this fractal to come up, avoiding the shock waves and then not getting achievement is meh…
• Rewards not random: I would like to see a change where you could trade the mist materials you need to upgrade your ascended rings for the daily fractal relics. This would help people to increase their AR the normal way (infusing rings, adding better AR). Of course I know that you can now just add all AR to weapons and armor, but still I think the randomness of the upgrade materials is a bad design.

Associated Risks
I don’t think there are much risk, except for a possible kitten storm when swamp fractal would not be the easiest and fastest one anymore

1. Fix the Reward scaling so that u actuallu feel like u get rewarded for, for example personal lvl 30, when u do a lvl 5 fractal. Today that is not the case.

2. Make ascended gear salvagable. If u have few characters and get all those rings etc… u have no need for them and they only give u a few silver in case u sell them. Make them salvagable for ascended mats.

Reasons

Make ppl feel they get the right kind of reward due to their lvl despite tagging along with their friends at low lvl.

Make better use of the ascended drops if u dont need them for u’r character.

Proposal Overview
The Agony Protection Device allows players to take an extra burden of positioning an environmental item and themselves in a fight in order to avoid agony.

Goal of Proposal
This proposal assumes that it should be possible to do Fractals by replacing the need for agony resistance with a higher requirement on skill. It proposes a method to allow this by giving a group the option to add a secondary mechanic to encounters which—if executed successfully—allows the players to avoid agony.

Proposal Functionality
At the start of each fractal, the Agony Protection Device, an environmental item, spawns along with the players. The item creates a small zone around it. In this zone, players are immune to agony (alternative: can not receive new stacks of agony). This zone wanders with the item no matter if it is carried by a player, or not.
For those of you familiar with the Tower of Nightmares, there was a similar device in some of the chambers that made players immune to the toxic pollen.

The additional burden for the group is to carry around the device (no weapon skills while carrying) and to organize group play such that the characters are in the zone when agony is about to hit.

At the start of each Fractal, there is a robot which allows to reset the device (remove the old one, create a new one at the position of the robot).

Using fractals to tell story:

Proposal Overview
Fractals should be used to tell as more about the lore/history of Tyria.

Goal of Proposal
Increase the amount of lore used for the fractals and creating new fractals which story and background informations. This is such a good oppertunity to tell us about things that happende before GW2, things that could happen in the future, things of an alternate version of Tyria.

Proposal Functionality
Existing fractals:
I think the fractals should have some more story, like what is this underwater fractal thing, what happened in this strange rata-sum version, is it ascalon we are over-running? It would be great if we got some more informations about them while doing them, either by getting more informations from Dessa or by some writings found in them or NPCs you could talk to.

New fractals:

• There could be fractals which tell us about events that happened between GW1 and GW2
• Fractals that tell us about things that happened even before GW1
• Fractals telling alternate versions of history: I would especially love to see a fractal where we help Shiro to kill the Emporer (still a great fan of Shiro )
• Fractals about a possible future: Everything is overrun by Scarlet (sorry, I just had to write that here, since I like here even if so many hate her^^)
  I’ll complete the list here with this examples, since I could go on about this for a long time.

Associated Risks
Of course people might not care about lore/story, making it a bit of wasted time for you devs, but I still think many would think it a nice addition and if it leads to new fractals everyone should be happy.

Proposal Overview
Tradeable account-bound items between party members

Goal of Proposal
Reduce (considerably) reliance on RNG for certain important items in the game, reduce inventory/bank clutter of useless items.

Proposal Functionality
When Fractal Rings, Ascended Weapons and/or (open to discussion) Exotic Account-bound items drop, party members will be able to share them among themselves using a loot interface.

Essentially, the above items will be “Party bound” to the current party members, so you can’t kick someone to invite you friend to get your items, but gives the opportunity to share the loot among your teammates.

I’ll give an example of the “issue” this will easily solve: I play on my Guardian but want a Fractal Dagger for my Elementalist, I already have a Fractal Sword on my Guardian. A friend is playing on his D/D Thief with 2 Fractal Daggers and wants a Fractal Sword for his Ranger. We defeat the final boss, I get a Sword and he gets a Dagger. We both lose….

Associated Risks
There is no risk here, the items to be made tradeable are absolutely worthless if you don’t need them.

Note: this idea is originally from someone else. I’ve read it somewhere in a Fractals-complaints thread in the dungeon forum. If you can show me the post where it originally stems from, I will be glad to cite the author.

Proposal Overview
Turn the Dredge Fractal’s Rabsovich encounter into a third possible path (together with bombs and turrets).

Goal of Proposal
This proposal comes from the opinion that the Dredge Fractal takes too long to complete, meaured by a personal baseline of about 15 to 20 minutes for a single Fractal.
It reduces the 4-parts Fractal (pressure-plates, hallways, Rabsovich, boss) to a 3-parts Fractal.

Proposal Functionality
After the pressure-plates cage, people will find one of three possible ways chosen for them:

• Bombs path, as usual, but with the Rabsovich room being empty
• Turrets path, as usual, but with the Rabsovich room being empty
• Bombs path empty and Rabsovich room containing Rabsovich, his Dredge and his car

In order to make the Rabsovich fight more similar to the other parts, I’d also propose to change the fight a bit like suggested by Ken DeBoer here:

Instead of the dredge carrier, Rabsovich would spawn a certain number of dredge every 1/4 life.

Thus, the encounter would have the same form of damaging the primary objective (the doors or Rabsovich) to result in enemy spawns, that have to be dealt with in order to continue. I actually like this a lot. It allows the players to push their limit by making the decision: should we damage the boss more to take more Dredge at once (making the encounter faster) or should we play it safe? Therefore, maybe Dredge should spawn more often (like all 1/16 life) but in smaller groups.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

I would like us to start of by listing the top three things we would like to see evolved in Fractal Design. Idea proposals can come after this stage.

Chris

1. Procedural Generation
it would be nice if at least some elements found in a fractal were a bit randomize so that every run has variety
2 rewards
making rewards not entirely dependable on RNG
3 User generated content
This is perhaps a bit too ambitious but perhaps if the mists can be found to dwell in alternate realities not just the past, it would be interesting to allow players to design their own fractals and share them with the community.

1. Fractals are a skill based activity it is acceptable to leave people behind (in terms of difficulty).

I’m conditionally ok with this attitude, as elitist as it might seem. If what it means is, “not everyone will reach the highest tier fractals, but those people would have no reason to anyways,” then fair enough. But if there are “goodies” placed on higher tiers that are better than the stuff earnable at lower tiers, then everyone needs to be able to get there. You can either have A. high tier fractals that anyone can get to but that it takes time and effort to reach and reward special loot, or B. high tier fractals that only the elite can manage, but that offer only bragging rights, not unique loot. You shouldn’t be able to have it both ways.

Proposal Overview
The Fractal Stabilizer achievement awards the player with titles/items for mastering all instabilities within level tiers. The mastery within the tiers is tracked by separate achievements.

Goal of Proposal
This proposal wants to address the following points:

• Something to show off that you are a Fractal player
• Only the easiest instabilities are chosen

Proposal Functionality
For each level tier that features instabilities (currently only 31-40 and 41-50), an achievement is introduced that counts the number of different instabilities within that tier that the player has completed a Fractal run with. This awards achievement points.

The main achievement tracks how many of these “tier-achievements” have been completed. It does not provide achievement points, but awards with titles and/or items.
Items can be something like a skin box or a “bag of relics”. I’d suggest to use titles. Maybe an item every second tier-completion if that would be too many titles (in the future).

By the way, for I saw

Chris Whiteside: I would like us to start of by listing the top three things we would like to see evolved in Fractal Design. Idea proposals can come after this stage.

quoted again. I hope I did not misunderstand this, I thought that this idea of a “only-top 3” stage was remedied by calling it a “proposal and top 3 evolutions’s stage” later on:

Chris Whiteside: Note during the proposal and top 3 evolution’s stage there really is no need to have summaries.

So I hope I did not post my proposals at the wrong time. After all, too many “stages” would lead again to a problem discussed in the CDI-meta thread: people who have only time at weekends. They should be possible to participate in every stage.
Now, I don’t know how long this CDI is about to run… but weekends come only once per week!

Ohoni.6057:

1. Fractals are a skill based activity it is acceptable to leave people behind (in terms of difficulty).

I’m conditionally ok with this attitude, as elitist as it might seem. If what it means is, “not everyone will reach the highest tier fractals, but those people would have no reason to anyways,” then fair enough. But if there are “goodies” placed on higher tiers that are better than the stuff earnable at lower tiers, then everyone needs to be able to get there. You can either have A. high tier fractals that anyone can get to but that it takes time and effort to reach and reward special loot, or B. high tier fractals that only the elite can manage, but that offer only bragging rights, not unique loot. You shouldn’t be able to have it both ways.

I have a question here: Isn’t unique loot/ Skins bragging rights? or titles? Speaking of rewards I Need to say somthing that bothers me tbh.

When I started fractals I invested hudge ammounts of Money for: Repair cannisters / Several armor sets ( since you couldn’t go out and repair if you broke your armor inside fractals you were screwed cause no way in repairing it), rez orbs and many other stuff… The rewards were really bad still I played them everyday and finally got somwhere before 2013 finally to the Maximum scale. I really enjoyed just playing hard Content and I didn’t bother investing most of my Money to simply advance. Now I even mentioned rewards at the end of my proposel. so What have changed?

I guess for myself the Fractal reset kinda is a big Point there because I know want to earn bragging rights in case they take away everything again and reset it for whatever reason. Before I didn’t care and was happy with my 81 sign.

What else might be a Point that the whole Level up 31-50 was so grindy and not near the difficulty of the old scale 60+ or whatever that it didn’t feel like progressing or Clearing hard Content but like grinding easy stuff just to advance ( and in my case stuff I already did ).

I think if fractals 50 + are based on skill needed to complete 80 with 10 ar ( basicaly doding all ar attacks and stuff ) Players might can overlook if they’re skill get tested they can or at least I could overlook the lak of rewards that aren’t as good as farming cof p1. But I still think there should be the Special reward for fractals ( since the fractal weapons are devalued hard already).

And if you really want everything accessable: I’m fine with having a reward costing 100 mio fractal relics starting at Level 50. reducing cost by to a 1/10 every 10 Levels you complete past 50… sooo it really is smarter to advance than farm (so you could basicaly buy it for 1000 pristines at Level 100 I think:)

Firstable, my main language isn’t english, so i apologie for the numerous language errors.

Proposal Overview

I propose to change fractal by a real fractal dungeon: 50/100 floors, level up diifukittenes each floor, no design gamble. A boss every level but a big boss evry 5 lvl.
For the big boss, allowing players to make 2 party (10 players) to kill it. The 10 players must have the same fractal level.

→ It will give a real dungeon experience.

Goal of Proposal

GW2 doesn’t give a really dungeon/party player experience. Dungeon can be runned and fractal are just to easy since it’s always the same.
Indeed, fractal (3+1) can be runned too….

Proposal Functionality

It’s like a big tower with 50/100 floors. Since monster level will up each floor, the difficulty will naturally up and the time to do the fractal too.
As now, it’s nice to have a boss at each stage but you could add a big boss every 5 floors:
- the big boss must have minion/guards
- The big boss and guard must have a advanced AI to play with efficient strategies
- Players can just have 1 try by week
- Players will be forced to make real strategy,
- Anet must allow players to make 2 party (10 players) to kill it (players must have the same fractal level)
- the reward have to be good enough to forced players to go to the top lvl of the tower fractal

Associated Risks

Don’t know

maddoctor.2738:

Proposal Overview
Tradeable account-bound items between party members

Proposal Functionality
Essentially, the above items will be “Party bound” to the current party members, so you can’t kick someone to invite you friend to get your items, but gives the opportunity to share the loot among your teammates.

I’m actually ok with this as long as it’s tier locked by personal level (i.e a person with fractal reward level 1 can’t join a level 48 fractal where a weapon drops and get handed it bypassing the requirements.)

Say locked for each tier? like 10-19 20-29 30-39 40-49
so if you’re level 11 you can get given a drop from 1-19 , if you’re level 41 you can be given a drop from all fractal levels.

Ohoni.6057:

1. Fractals are a skill based activity it is acceptable to leave people behind (in terms of difficulty).

I’m conditionally ok with this attitude, as elitist as it might seem. If what it means is, “not everyone will reach the highest tier fractals, but those people would have no reason to anyways,” then fair enough. But if there are “goodies” placed on higher tiers that are better than the stuff earnable at lower tiers, then everyone needs to be able to get there. You can either have A. high tier fractals that anyone can get to but that it takes time and effort to reach and reward special loot, or B. high tier fractals that only the elite can manage, but that offer only bragging rights, not unique loot. You shouldn’t be able to have it both ways.

The fractals were promoted as a skill based activity where the “goodies” are indeed locked for all except the “elite” so it is within the design parameters.
I’m a little confused by your example, in B the high tier fractal is the work, the bragging rights (in the form of the reward items) are the reward.

There should be no expectation in a game for an individual player to obtain all the items they want, it is acceptable to lock some items away for “elite” players to give them rewards for displays of skill.
If you look at my multi-tier fractal armor suggestion on the first page you’ll see that my proposed reward does not completely lock them out but gives them a lesser form of the armor.

nicolas.9045:

Firstable, my main language isn’t english, so i apologie for the numerous language errors.

Proposal Overview

I propose to change fractal by a real fractal dungeon: 50/100 floors, level up diifukittenes each floor, no design gamble. A boss every level but a big boss evry 5 lvl.
For the big boss, allowing players to make 2 party (10 players) to kill it. The 10 players must have the same fractal level.

-> It will give a real dungeon experience.

Goal of Proposal

GW2 doesn’t give a really dungeon/party player experience. Dungeon can be runned and fractal are just to easy since it’s always the same.
Indeed, fractal (3+1) can be runned too….

Proposal Functionality

It’s like a big tower with 50/100 floors. Since monster level will up each floor, the difficulty will naturally up and the time to do the fractal too.
As now, it’s nice to have a boss at each stage but you could add a big boss every 5 floors:
- the big boss must have minion/guards
- The big boss and guard must have a advanced AI to play with efficient strategies
- Players can just have 1 try by week
- Players will be forced to make real strategy,
- Anet must allow players to make 2 party (10 players) to kill it (players must have the same fractal level)
- the reward have to be good enough to forced players to go to the top lvl of the tower fractal

Associated Risks

Don’t know

Associated Risks

1 Try by week is bad design. I don’t know what is the reason to gate hard Content with time… yeah you can say heeeeyyy this Boss didn’t get completed for 3 months but basicaly it took the Players only 12 tries to complete it.. I am very very very against timegated hard Content.. Hard Content shoulnd’t be made hard by just saying you can enter it only once a week.. It should be hard so even with having it available all time you Need to Play nearly perfect to get a kill. In my opginon Geargating ( as you have it in WoW) or timegating ( not allowing to try more than once a week) has nothing at all to do with skill. I really hope that gw2 does not go that path because it is plain and simply annoying farming Money for enough AR to advance/not beeing able to Play Content cause you already had a try this week. You had to make strategies as well when you were playing scale 60+ fractals with only 10 -15 AR when they released fractals.. You don’t Need to force People to make strategies only because it spawms once a week you can force em just by doing hard Content with good mechanics:)

Proposal Overview
Make fractals more rewarding activity, by adding unlockables and new rewads.

Goal of Proposal
To interest people with higher lvl fractals. Adding new courency, making fractals more “dungeonish”

Proposal Functionality
- Add a new courency (like dungeon tokens), which you will gain in the lvls 40+ (or 50+)
- For that courency you would buy tier 2 fractal weapons (ascended weapons, with new skins) and fractal armor (ascended, with new skin).
- This would be long term, goal farming high level fractals becouse you will gain about 20 tokens per run (higher lvls more tokens), but armor and t2 fractal weapons would cost 180+ per run. You can gain only one time tokens by each lvl, each day. I mean: If you do lvl 48 two times you will get tokens only ones. After that you will do lvl 50, and you will get the tokens.
- Tier 2 weapons and armor would be without stats. After purchase you will choose which stat should it has (like new ascended backpacks). Choosing stat is avaiable only once.
- This would not ruin the “Ascended crafting” becouse to get to the lvl 50+ you need that additional Agony resist (from the armor), to survive.
- Also for players who don’t need that armor, they don’t like that skin or somethin somethin. Players can exchange tokens for T6 crafting materials. This will reduce price of crafting T7 mats , and also make Fractals more profitable activity if your goal is not that new cool armor and weapons.
- Also also, You can buy with new courency new Gift for new Legendary weapons , trinkets or armors (in future).

I already posted this in the dungeon forum yesterday, as I was unaware of a fractal CDI coming up. I am sorry for the double post, but I feel it is best to have this suggestion here as well for completeness.

Proposal overview
Make agony resistance (AR) account wide.

Goal of Proposal
Fractals become much more repeatable/replayable if we can bring any character. It makes it a different experience. The fractal levels are account wide, but I find myself bringing the same character because she is the only one who is equiped with AR.

Proposal Functionality
Similar to the change that was made for magic find in the past, where it was removed from the gear and made account wide, the same could be done for AR.

Associated Risks
- People who already build up their AR should have this transferred to their account somehow in order to not lose progress.
- Balancing the acquirement of AR.
- Balancing power creep from infusion slots that can now slot other attributes.

scimi.3487:

Proposal Overview: Add Fractal specific, tradeable rewards.

An intriguing idea, I’ll build my own proposal based on this later.

Scorch der Juengere.7328:

Proposal Overview
The Agony Protection Device allows players to take an extra burden of positioning an environmental item and themselves in a fight in order to avoid agony.

Interesting… should there be an extra quest required within a pre-fractal to acquire this device? (In order to make it take a bit more time, preserving some of the value of the AR that players have collected)

Fractals is in my eyes really cool for when I want to play gw2 pve but dont have any particular place to go, since it supplies a (limited) different experience every time. And the progression system works well since it lets you choose your own difficulty. The things I would like to see changed are:

-I would like to be able to exhange my ascended rings for something else, maybe for les fractal relics then I can buy them with. So that I do feel like I actually got something no matter which one I get. (The same is probably true for other ascended gear although to a lesser extent)

-Agony. The Agony system is just a barrier stopping people from going into higher fractals without the resist. In effect this makes players have to farm in order to get further when you actually want to have people enjoy the content. As well as that this is totally different from the rest of the game meaning that you can be a good player but not be able to play high level fractals.
To get these things on the same page you could forget about agony resistance ( leave the agony as a special attack) and have some sort of small boost in damage or defence against all fractal enemies. This would let people without enough skill play higher level fractals and diminish the one hit kill wonders that scaling in all aspects of the game seem to have.

-Fractals doesnt really have an end. Which may be the point of it but I think it would be nice if the highest current fractal level available would be something special. Like an entirely thrown together map of different parts of fractal maps or parts of the game. Which at it best would be randomized as well.

Just a quick 3 things I want to see.

1) Bring Twilight Arbor Forward Up path back. Either make it a fractal or return it to TA and move the aether path to fractals and shorten it. Twilight arbor forward up was an amazingly well designed path yet it was unpopular because the final boss was unforgiving to inexperienced players. A simple despawn of spiders on wipe would of fixed this and you wouldnt have had to take the such an amazing path away from experienced players.

2) Increase rewards. As it stands I struggle to get players outside my regular group to come for fractals. The rewards are simply not good enough. The only players who do them are going for relics or really enjoy the content so they dont mind making no profit. The gold reward should scale better for higher levels. Rings shouldnt drop in higher levels (they should also be salvageble). Fractal weapons should be more common at higher levels and the selectable fractal weapon box should be implemented asap at 40+. Or 50+ if you raise the cap in the next fractal patch.

3) Rebalance dredge and other fractals. The design of the dredge fractal is actually pretty good. The problem is it is far too long. Some parts should be cut completely. Id suggest the bomb and door runs. And the clown car should be altered. As it stands the majority of the fractal is spent slaying invulnerable infinitely spawning dredge from a clown car. This gets very boring after a few minutes. And it can take about 20 minutes for the clown car alone in some cases at higher levels. Most of the other fractals are in a good position. I would however add the underwater fractal to the second tier so it is actually played (most groups roll for swamp and therefore never play underwater anymore).

Afte reading most of the posts, it seem that three things stand out the most:

- Rewards – Not enough

- Weapon skins – People want them

- Dredge – No explanation needed

Conski Deshan.2057:

maddoctor.2738:

Proposal Overview
Tradeable account-bound items between party members

Proposal Functionality
Essentially, the above items will be “Party bound” to the current party members, so you can’t kick someone to invite you friend to get your items, but gives the opportunity to share the loot among your teammates.

I’m actually ok with this as long as it’s tier locked by personal level (i.e a person with fractal reward level 1 can’t join a level 48 fractal where a weapon drops and get handed it bypassing the requirements.)

Say locked for each tier? like 10-19 20-29 30-39 40-49
so if you’re level 11 you can get given a drop from 1-19 , if you’re level 41 you can be given a drop from all fractal levels.

I never thought of that! Yes a fractal level 1 shouldn’t be able to join a fotm 49 to get weapon skins and making a tier lock should solve this.

Proposal overview
Account bound rewards tiered on fractal level.

Goal of Proposal
To create some prestige items, where a specific activity has been completed to a set standard with the reward only being obtainable from that.
This gives the item a value that is not based in its gold worth or desirability.

Proposal Functionality
Several different types of items:
“Guaranteed”
Like the Pvp rank vendors add equivalent fractal rank vendors. These can sell a small selection of items, possibly with each fractal tier up selling a more upgraded version.

“Fractal based”
Fractal specific rewards that only start dropping at 40+ since this tier currently has no additional drop compared to 30-39. i.e Mini Anomaly, Mini Evolved grawl shaman etc.

“Mystic forged”
Shards+Pristines+ x + y , basicly to add a reason to use your shards and pristines (In a reasonable manner, the return on shard investment with the runes is very poor).

“Fractal based legendary”
This is a legendary weapon who’s gifts make use of Shards, Pristines, Gift of Asencsion, prehaps a drop unique to each fractal (more common than the above one). Possibly having its precursor as a fractal weapon.

I have this vision that it has no real form so that when you first get it you choose what weapon it will be, so that one weapon design can be used to effectively create an entire set of new legendaries.

Associated Risks

Some groups of players take offence to skill based rewards due to a sense of entitlement to all rewards.

Honestly, Fractals are one of the better areas of the game. Im not sure, at least for me, that much change is needed. However, to contribute to the discussion:

Proposal Overview
Make ascended weapons and all ascended items be available at any fractal level above 10 with a reasonable drop chance.

Goal of Proposal
To give players who participate in the only content where ascended gear is REQUIRED the opportunity to obtain this gear through playing that content, making it rewarding to continue playing.

Proposal Functionality
Its no secret that the players want more ways to acquire ascended gear. The fact that barely anything ascended is obtained through fractals is insane, since fractals are the only area of the game where ascended is required. Add in all of the current fractal gear and weapons as drop chances from boss chests and the chest at the end of the run.
For example: an ascended chest piece could drop off the frozen worm boss in the frozen fractal(forgot the name). An ascended weapon could drop off the last boss. This is all similar to how ascended rings currently drop.

We also need to make sure the drop chances are realistic. Making the chances as rare as a precursor drop or a black lion key drop does not make this work.

Associated Risks
Too many players would acquire ascended gear too quickly. This could also impact the economy as players would rely on crafting and the Trading Post less, however this is also a positive since not everyone enjoys crafting or grinding for materials.

Summary All ascended weapons and gear are in the game. The fact that these items are not available via the content they are intended for is just silly. I do not understand this and I do not understand the reasoning why the ascended items that were rolled out slowly over the last year were not included in the loot tables in Fractals. Ascended gear, apparently, is only required in fractals. Why not make them available in fractals? I do not mean resources or materials…I mean the exact piece. Example: Zojja’s Claymore would drop off a best chest or something. We then can select the stats we want.

This idea would serve both improving our desire as players to run fractals, as well as address a key concern about ascended gear acquisition which was brought up ad nausem in the ascended gear discussion.

Make all current items available…do not slowly introduce one or two at a time. All.

I see some other people suggesting procedural/endless fractals and on a similar vein a sort of Sword Art approach where you ascend 100 unique levels, these are all interesting ideas and it would be interesting if we could incorporate it into a split type system?

Say you speak to Dessa and you can choose “Scenarios fractals” or “Mist Tower Ascent”
(scenarios being the fractals we have now), The mist tower may only be agony gated, with rapidly increasing difficulty? Maybe a special chest at the top? regular checkpoints could be spread throughout which allow you to rejoin where you left.

(This is a discussion post that I’d like to see thoughts or additions on).

@cesmode, The rings drop from 10 on very frequently, which allows enough AR to get to 20, by then you can have obtained the back piece and infused rings now drop, this provides enough AR to 30, from this on ascended weapons drop which provide AR, after 30 you may need to grab other gear but you’re not expected to be able to gain all the gear from one activity, verity being required to progress is nice.

It actually seems quite balanced already on the ascended gain within the activity.

Running with another idea that was proposed yesterday.

Proposal overview
Fractal Armor

Goal of Proposal
To provide another avenue for people to obtain ascended armor which would allow them to continue up the fractal ladder cough leaderboard cough

Proposal Functionality
This would would similar to the new backpiece that was introduced with the LS. The armor should be amazing looking and have similar effects as the weapons have.
For all armor slots, you will be able to choose the stat combination, but you will not be able to upgrade it if you transmute over it.

Tier 1 Fine = Buy for 100 relics
Tier 2 Masterwork = Tier 1 + 150 relics + 1 pristine relic + 3 Vials of Essence
Tier 3 Rare = Tier 2 + 200 relics + 5 pristine relics + 3 Globs of Essence
Tier 4 Exotic = Tier 3 + 250 relics + 10 pristine relics + 1 Shard of Essence
Tier 5 Ascended = Tier 4 + 3-4 T7 crafting material depending on what armor slot + 15 pristine relics + Gift of Fractals

Gift of Fractals = 250 relics + 3 Shards of Essence + 10 Crystalline Dust + 3 Globs of Dark Matter

Total Per Piece to Ascend:
950 Relics + 31 pristine relics + 3 Vials + 3 Globs + 4 Shards + T7 Crafting + 10 Dust + 3 Dark Matter

Total Set:
5700 Relics + 186 pristine relics + 18 vials + 18 Globs + 24 Shards + T7 Crafting + 60 Dust + 18 Dark matter

Associated Risks
Players could rush through most of the armor since the mass quantity of relics that have laying around. Players complain that said players were “given” free armor

Conski Deshan.2057:

@cesmode, The rings drop from 10 on very frequently, which allows enough AR to get to 20, by then you can have obtained the back piece and infused rings now drop, this provides enough AR to 30, from this on ascended weapons drop which provide AR, after 30 you may need to grab other gear but you’re not expected to be able to gain all the gear from one activity, verity being required to progress is nice.

It actually seems quite balanced already on the ascended gain within the activity.

-The rings drop frequently yes…
-Infused rings come after, yes, although to be honest I only have had 5 or 6 of these drop.
-Back piece, sure. Maybe. But in order to upgrade that to infused I need to hop over to the forge and drop 250 scales and/or ectos…Why?
-At levels 30+ I haven’t seen a drop and I do not hear success stories from other people in 30+ that have received many, if any, ascended drops.

The last part of your paragraph is where I think you are 100% wrong:
“but you’re not expected to be able to gain all the gear from one activity, "

Why not? Missing the point I was getting at. Ascended gear is ONLY required in fractals. It makes sense to make all gear obtainable through fractals, with a reasonable amount of effort. Why is it unreasonable to ask that all ascended items (trinkets, weapons, gear) be available through the activity they are DESIGNED for? And not at precursor drop chance either.

The top three ways I’d like to see fractals evolve are:
1) More fractals; I’d love to see things like ToN and Escape from LA incorporated into fractals in the future. It’s a great way to have new players experience some content that they weren’t there for as well as a reminder for veterans who were.
2) Better/more distinct rewards. I’d personally like it if things like Azurite could be obtained from the appropriate fractals, but I think the devs already shot that down a while back. Even more critical though is to bring the gold rewards in line with the time it takes to run high level fractals and a way to get decent equipment without relying on RNG. The other dungeons get their own set of weapons and armor they buy with tokens why don’t we?
3) Something to do with ascended rings. My preference would be to allow them to be salvaged for things like Mist Essence and +1 Agony Infusions in addition to normal salvage rewards.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

I would like us to start of by listing the top three things we would like to see evolved in Fractal Design. Idea proposals can come after this stage.

Chris

1.) Infusions and their removal from equipment
2.) Reward Matrix
3.) Time equity between individual instances

Chris, what is your take on it all. You did say once that you’ll think about the whole thing, but have yet to say anything in that matter. I want to see the point of view you, the developers have towards fractals themselves. Are you happy with the way they work? Do you want to improve certain areas that you think need improvement? Do you think it’s perfect the way it is? I mean it’s given that it is not perfect, hence the CDI, but what’s your take on it. Because since Fractured the only things we’ve been getting is that there is no issues, everything working as intended vibe from every answer we got from the devs. And to be honest, there weren’t many and they were definitely not in timely manner.

Because from what I’ve been seeing this CDI is more of a throwing ideas at the wall and hope they stick. But at the same time we have no idea if it sticks because we’re never being told what will be taken seriously and what will be taken with grain of salt.

Let’s bounce ideas back and forth, rather than just us brainstorming and hoping you guys like it. What real CDI should be is communication between players and developers. Give us some idea you have, we chip in on it with our own ideas to make it even better and the final product will make everyone happy. Rather than grabbing a handful of posts and saying “This is what everyone wants”.

I don’t mean to be critical on any level. It’s just that I would love to see some actual communication between devs and the players. At least in a way you guys so it with balancing when you listen to players, but at the same time respond with your own ideas and concerns.

I keep seeing people saying they want to replay the living story inside fractals.
I get it. People want to replay the temporary content. I do too. I really do. Just not inside fractals.

If the only way to replay previous temporary living story content is through fractals a large number of players would be excluded as they are not fractal runners. The subset of fractal runners that does want the living story content would be reliant on RNG to actually replay the content they wanted. This wouldn’t please anyone.

At the same time we need more fractals and more fractal variety. Every fractal should have multiple paths to completion (Like dredge turrets vs bomb door or bloomhunger vs mossman).

Let new fractals be previous missions / dungeons from GW1 or totally new things like cliffside / swamp / underwater etc.

I’m all for replayable living story events just not inside fractals.

I sort of feel bad for Chris already. I tried to keep my posts short, but every time I come back to the thread I see walls of text that are “formatted”. It’s still difficult to get through.

I really wish people could be more concise, use more lists, and less walls of text.

Anyway, I like a lot of the ideas so far. But it does seem the playerbase is all on the same page here. It would be beneficial to get some developer interaction to see what page they’re on. (But I can’t imagine trying to soak in this many words at once, so I suspect that’s why we aren’t getting too much red yet).

Lilith Ajit.6173:

But it does seem the playerbase is all on the same page here. It would be beneficial to get some developer interaction to see what page they’re on. (But I can’t imagine trying to soak in this many words at once, so I suspect that’s why we aren’t getting too much red yet).

It’s also not even 7am in Seattle. That’s probably part of it.

I propose we voluntarily hold back any more feedback until Chris returns, catches up, and has a chance to respond. Unless somebody feels they have something new or different to add? I feel like we’ve gotten 10 different versions of the same proposal for how to get existing rewards easier/use up relics/get value for Ascended rings.

Perhaps a pause makes sense until we have some direction forward?

Conski Deshan.2057:

3. The levels and AR are there to allow a tiered system, allowing you to easily gate the rewards which is helpful.

It’s already gated by difficulty. AR is gating it behind money.

Agree with the rest, though. In particular, it’s important to make sure that skins still require completing high level fractals. This is one reason I’d prefer being able to trade in 3 or 4 skins for any one skin over being able to buy them with relics.

timmyf.1490:

Lilith Ajit.6173:

But it does seem the playerbase is all on the same page here. It would be beneficial to get some developer interaction to see what page they’re on. (But I can’t imagine trying to soak in this many words at once, so I suspect that’s why we aren’t getting too much red yet).

It’s also not even 7am in Seattle. That’s probably part of it.

I propose we voluntarily hold back any more feedback until Chris returns, catches up, and has a chance to respond. Unless somebody feels they have something new or different to add? I feel like we’ve gotten 10 different versions of the same proposal for how to get existing rewards easier/use up relics/get value for Ascended rings.

Perhaps a pause makes sense until we have some direction forward?

Personally I totally agree here. I’m holding back most of my stuff until there’s a discussion in the works. With each other, and with Chris. I said my proposal, and Now for the waiting game.

There’s just so much on this thread already. It’s astounding that “Fractal evolution” is still too broad of a topic. “Fractal Reward Evolution” I think should be a completely separate topic from “Fractal Evolution” because rewards need so much work. Lol.

One Note Chord.5031:

Conski Deshan.2057:

3. The levels and AR are there to allow a tiered system, allowing you to easily gate the rewards which is helpful.

It’s already gated by difficulty. AR is gating it behind money.

Agree with the rest, though. In particular, it’s important to make sure that skins still require completing high level fractals. This is one reason I’d prefer being able to trade in 3 or 4 skins for any one skin over being able to buy them with relics.

I had intended to make a point 7 with : all fractal exclusive rewards should be account bound to ensure maintenance of the prestige, but instead I made another proposal incorporating it I do agree with that view.

It is a form of money gate I guess but it also means that a player must have ascended quality armor which does stop under-geared players, I’m not sure if that’s an acceptable return for people or not.

Xar.6185:

I keep seeing people saying they want to replay the living story inside fractals.
I get it. People want to replay the temporary content. I do too. I really do. Just not inside fractals.

If the only way to replay previous temporary living story content is through fractals a large number of players would be excluded as they are not fractal runners. The subset of fractal runners that does want the living story content would be reliant on RNG to actually replay the content they wanted. This wouldn’t please anyone.

At the same time we need more fractals and more fractal variety. Every fractal should have multiple paths to completion (Like dredge turrets vs bomb door or bloomhunger vs mossman).

Let new fractals be previous missions / dungeons from GW1 or totally new things like cliffside / swamp / underwater etc.

I’m all for replayable living story events just not inside fractals.

Would it be satisfactory for you if old living story instances do continue to be incorporated into the random fractal rotation, while also becoming selectable from some kind of terminal for people who would like to replay just these instances as “stabilized fractals” (possibly with different content/rewards compared to the normal the fractal rotation)?

I personally think adding these slightly reworked LS instances is a great way to recycle old content while driving up the variety of challenges one might encounter during a fractal run, so I would hate to see Anet stop adding them to fractals. Also, old LS instances becoming available as a fractal is a nice, canonical way to keep them in the game. Certainly compared to our characters meditating back into time to recall events they might have never even experienced themselves, like it happened in GW1 for starter missions on characters from other campaigns.

Conski Deshan.2057:

One Note Chord.5031:

Conski Deshan.2057:

3. The levels and AR are there to allow a tiered system, allowing you to easily gate the rewards which is helpful.

It’s already gated by difficulty. AR is gating it behind money.

It is a form of money gate I guess but it also means that a player must have ascended quality armor which does stop under-geared players, I’m not sure if that’s an acceptable return for people or not.

Yeah, I think this is really what it comes down to. I still wish Anet had stuck with their original vision, only making cosmetic things take huge amounts of time and money. But that ship has sailed, and I think that making AR less important is basically a pipe dream. There are probably more realistic things to focus on in this thread, sadly.

(I do think that account-wide AR is important, though, given the cost of ascended armor and high-value agony infusions.)

Galespark.7835:

Xar.6185:

<snip>.

Would it be satisfactory for you if old living story instances do continue to be incorporated into the random fractal rotation, while also becoming selectable from some kind of terminal for people who would like to replay just these instances as “stabilized fractals” (possibly with different content/rewards compared to the normal the fractal rotation)?

I personally think adding these slightly reworked LS instances is a great way to recycle old content while driving up the variety of challenges one might encounter during a fractal run, so I would hate to see Anet stop adding them to fractals. Also, old LS instances becoming available as a fractal is a nice, canonical way to keep them in the game. Certainly compared to our characters meditating back into time to recall events they might have never even experienced themselves, like it happened in GW1 for starter missions on characters from other campaigns.

I think the important part is that they are selectable from somewhere.

I also agree that reusing the LS encounters is a great way to recycle the content. I just think we are selling ourselves short asking for them to be added to fractals. Off the top of my head why not a personal story teller in the home instance that can be used as an interface to ‘remember when I did that cool thing’ or a scrying pool or with assistance from the pale tree. Plus if the LS encounters are used somewhere other than fractals things like the molten facility won’t have to be shortened.

The upside would be every new fractal would be totally new, the downside would be taking longer to see new fractals.

Proposal Overview
reward structure tweaks and fractal re-balance

Goal of Proposal
High end fractals currently do not reward sufficiently for time and effort required to complete them. Additionally some of this is caused by fractals not being balanced properly.

Proposal Functionality
Increase gold rewards for running higher levels of difficulty (40+) and add titles for running fractal content. Fractals are perceived as the end game PvE content and there are no titles (that I am aware of) associated with this content. Why?

Re-balance what are considered opening fractals. People always roll for underwater or swamp (usually swamp) b/c they are the shortest of the openers. Its great that you cant get dredge AND grawl anymore but nobody in their right mind will start with the harpy fractal knowing what could be next. I wouldn’t mind seeing additional NEW opening fractals and the ability to roll for a fractal being removed if they are all equal in length/difficulty to start with. What I mean is put a timer from the start of the fractal before re-rolling is ok. This would allow a run that is going poorly to still re-roll but prevent the endless this isn’t swamp lets go back.

Its been said before but warrants saying again. Remove the clown car from the dredge. Honestly just remove the room with the mini boss and clown car outright. That should put it roughly in line with other fractals in terms of time.

Associated Risks
Putting the gold at too high a reward level could mess up the economy. Since players who run the end game content tend to be wealthy enough to at least afford ascended armor/weapons it might widen the gap between the casuals and hardcore crowd.
Offset this by slightly increasing tangible rewards and giving intangibles such as additional unique skins or titles.

Xar.6185:

I also agree that reusing the LS encounters is a great way to recycle the content. I just think we are selling ourselves short asking for them to be added to fractals. Off the top of my head why not a personal story teller in the home instance that can be used as an interface to ‘remember when I did that cool thing’ or a scrying pool or with assistance from the pale tree. Plus if the LS encounters are used somewhere other than fractals things like the molten facility won’t have to be shortened.

The upside would be every new fractal would be totally new, the downside would be taking longer to see new fractals.

I think expanding the GW2 HoM is a good idea. I think some LW encounters make sense for Fractals, others do not.

My concern is that, if too many of them are added, Fractals lose their “wow, what on earth is this?” feeling. It becomes a very high probability that you’re just replaying old content.

Thaumanova was cool in that regard because it took something we knew about the world and gave us a little more insight into it.

Proposal Overview
Encourage players to experiment with mistlock instabilities by adjusting the rewards.

Goal of Proposal
The goal is to get players playing with the various instabilities. I see a preference to run only the easy instabilities, such as with scale 42 – reduced endurance regeneration. I’d love to play the difficult ones, but 4 other people might not agree, and I would hardly get anything more than usual out of such a run anyway. Ultimately, groups choose the path of least resistance towards that final chest. So the contents of that final chest might be the best influence on what path groups take.

Proposal Functionality
The mistlock instabilities should be weighted by difficulty (and I would assume you have metrics that would help you do this, such as the average time players spend in a particular scale/instability, or the number of deaths, etc) and the rewards of the final chest should be adjusted accordingly for each instability, instead of the difficulty scale. This can be just pure gold increase/decrease, or even altering the chance for something exotic/ascended to drop.

Associated Risks
Perhaps some additional confusion about the whole fractal system, as they are already pretty complicated to explain to newcomers. But I think we could manage it.

timmyf.1490:

Xar.6185:

snip

I think expanding the GW2 HoM is a good idea. I think some LW encounters make sense for Fractals, others do not.

My concern is that, if too many of them are added, Fractals lose their “wow, what on earth is this?” feeling. It becomes a very high probability that you’re just replaying old content.

Thaumanova was cool in that regard because it took something we knew about the world and gave us a little more insight into it.

I understand your concerns, and it is honestly just my personal preference. I believe fractals is the most original and valid medium I have seen used in an MMO to allow certain events in the past to be relived. In my earlier post I mentioned that fractals could be added to the random rotation while also having a “stabilized” version that is freely selectable from one of the terminals inside the fractal hub. These stabilized version could more closely (preferably completely) resemble the old LS content, while the random rotation version is modified to fit there, like the Molten Facility was.

As for “diluting” the experience, not every recycled instance has to be added to the random rotation, while of course completely new fractals should be added from time to time to keep the balance. Also, to me it hardly matter which came from LS and which did not at this point, since I have seen the original fractals so many times they are all content I am quite familiar with. I think everyone that does it regularly will get to this stage sooner or later.

Perhaps it would be best to continue this discussion when the CDI touches upon it more closely, this might be getting too specific. I won’t be replying here on this matter for now.

I think one nice Thing to know is where you want to go with fractals levelwise…

Is your current Idea :
-infinite scaling ( or at least to like Level 200 )
or
- scaling threw agony ( basicaly maybe having already 200 scales ready but Players can’t advance without apropriate agony Money / time spent to get it )
or
- scaling with hardcap and raising the hardcap every months or so?

I think this is very important to know.. depending on this People might have diffrent ideas how to implement:
- leaderboards
-rewards (for example: if we get really difficult Content where most will fail ( liadri light up achiev) idc that much about rewards)
- speaking about high Levels ( for me 50 + isn’t high Level since I already played 80+ but for others it is so there is confusion:))
- speaking about difficulty scaling (idc if 50-60 is still easy if we have it open to 200 but I would be annoyed if we only get 10 Levels all 6 months and than they are super easy farmmode your on cap again and wait for new Content )

Since it’s CDI I think it’s pretty important to at least tell us a bit of your opginons so we have a base about what to talk.

Alright, I’m posting again since my previous post has been infracted.
So as I had already said, my top 3 :
1) better rewards
2) harmonize/fix maps
3) Nothing … just do #1 and #2 good

My others posts stayed so I’ll just post again about rewards.
Fortunately, for this one, I can respect the suggested format

Proposal overview
The main problem of fractals is that RNG is everywhere and RNG is pretty unfair
Ascended weapons and armors are way too rare and too reliant on RNG. As the word RNG implies, some hardcore players will farm over and over and get nothing, other bad players will run just 2 or 3 times and get what they want …
Furthermore, even worse, even when we’re able to get one, we get stats we don’t want.

Goal of proposal
The goal here is to make fractals a more rewarding place, and those rewards being more fair, more reliable to get

Proposal functionnality
A]Solutions for stats :

1) Remove stats, let us choose them (universal boxes, it seems to already exist, waiting to be introduced)
2) Allow ascended, like legendaries, to be able to swap stats

B]Solutions to unfair RNG :
1) Drastically improve loot chance, allow to loot on mobs as well as at the end

2) Make pristine fractal relics tradable for 1 ascended weapon box or 1 ascended armor box
Consequently, change how many pristine you get from a run to prevent easy farm of lower levels :
11-20 : 1 pristine
21-30 : 2 pristine
31-40 : 3 pristine
41-50 : 4 pristine
Now, let’s say something like you need 20 pristine to get 1 box.
This way, you need about 5 days if you only do daily 41-50 to get 1 item, or much, much more if you do lower dailies.
You can be even faster if you farm several dailies in a day.

3) Add mats to the daily. You still get a chance to get 1 weapon or armor box But you also ALWAYS get to choose ascended material.
For instance, you can choose between
a) 1 deldrimor steel ingot OR 1 Spiritwood Plank OR 1 Elonian Leather Square (for weapon)
AND, in addition to that
b) 1 deldrimor steel ingot OR 1 Elonian Leather Square OR 1 bolt of Damask (armor)
This way, it gives a slight chance AND it also helps slowly towards crafting through guaranteed ascended mats.

Finally, infusions. Because seriously, it can’t be that only +1 are available and you should be able to get much better ones in higher levels, we should be able to get +2 AR, +3 AR … infusions to have a smoother progression that makes more sens.

Associated Risks
A] Stats

The number 2, making ascended able to change stats would remove the unicity of legendaries (except for skin).
Solution #1 (universal boxes) seems better

B]RNG
Solution 1) is bad, it does not remove RNG, it’s just a poor bandaid fix but better than nothing.

2) Definitely seems the fairest solution to me: it gets rid of kittenty RNG by allowing rewards to time investment while still keeping time gated reward.
Probably won’t happen since Anet apparently wants to remove currencies and get rid of pristine relics. It’s a shame.

3) Probably the easiest solution which does not require an extra currency. Not the best but still pretty good.
Also possible to be able to choose more than 1 in each category depending on daily level (like 1 for 21-40, 2 for 41-60 etc …).
“Risk” is still being forced to craft your wray through 500. Also a little decrease in prices of low tier materials, but would not be significant or dangerous.

No other risks except players being happier to play in fractals.

Proposal Overview
Fractal rewards (especially at high levels) are lackluster at best and need to be re-evaluated. The issue is twofold: lack of gold, and lack of actual reward.

Goal of Proposal
Right now, Fractal rewards scale horribly with the difficulty associated with them. I spent time and effort getting to Difficulty 50 (twice, mind you. Still bitter about removing my reward levels during Fractured.) and I feel like I am not rewarded for my time. A level 49/50 Fractal can easily take over an hour, especially with bad rolls. The reward should reflect that.

Proposal Functionality
The first thing I suggest is that for the gold reward at the end of Fractals, the game takes the minimum value of either your personal reward level OR the Fractal difficulty scale. So if my PR is 50 but we did a 32, the game would use 32. Conversely, if I was PR 41 and we did a 49, the game would use 41. Next, for the gold reward I would use the formula

min(personal reward level, fractal difficulty level) * 10 silver

So, for sake of numbers, I’ll provide 3 examples.

- John Warrior is PR46, but he runs a 32 with his friends. At the end chest, John Warrior would get 32*10s, or 03g02s00c.
- Jaime Elementalist is PR38 and runs a 42. At the end chest, Jaime Elementalist receives 38*10s, or 03g80s00c.
- Jane Necromancer is PR50 and runs a 50. At the end chest, Jane Necromancer would receive 50*10s, or 05g00s00c.

This solves the first half of the problem: the lack of gold reward. It brings it more in line with dungeon runs as far as time spent v. gold received. The second half of the issue comes from the craptastic rewards that RNGesus provides. The running joke is 2 blues and a green, but Fractals don’t even get that. More than half the time, I get nothing for my run. No ring, no ascended box, no fractal skin (I haven’t gotten a single Fractal skin since Fractured, mind you.). When I do get a ring, lately at 49/50 I’ve been getting an UNINFUSED ring. This makes me rage more than no reward at all. My proposal aims to fix the item compensation issue.

Each bonus chest has a chance at nothing, a ring, an ascended weapon/armor chest, or a fractal skin. I just have some minor tweaks to this.

The nothing roll becomes 1.5g. Straight up. You don’t get anything to help you with Fractals, so you get a little more coin. Seems fair to me.

The ring roll becomes as such: Fractal difficulty 1-20, uninfused. 20-30, infused, 30+ 2g. Seriously, by PR30, rings are no longer a reward. They become vendor trash. Now, if you wanted a chance at rings, just do a Fractal 1-30 to still get one as a drop.

Ascended weapons/armor chests: No change.

Fractal skins: Make these actually exist. I’m convinced they don’t anymore. (No one in my permanent Fractal group has gotten one since Fractured).

Associated Risks
If anything, for the first little bit it might flood the economy with more gold as people farm each tier of reward. Once the initial burst goes down, however, I don’t see any lasting effects, other than Fractals of the Mists getting a second wind.

Proposal Overview

Scaling Fractals for Number of Players.

Goal of Proposal

Open up game content that is currently unmanageable for small groups of friends who like to game together. Applies to fractals, dungeons, or any instanced GW2 content.

I game with two friends whom I know in RL outside MMOs; they have effectively left the game due to being locked out of party-oriented PvE content. The game currently allows for simple single-player roaming, 5-person dungeons, or zerg events. Groups of RL friends less than the magic number of 5 need not apply.

Proposal Functionality

Similar to the instances in the Tower event and other NC Soft games (e.g., late great City of Heroes), the fractal (or dungeon) would scale depending on the size of the party when the instance is generated. Rewards would also scale, as required.

Associated Risks

Some players may try to game the system to optimize party size vs. rewards.
Some party sizes may not balance well. This is true now with the scaling in the Escape from Lion’s Arch event, and was also true in the Tower.

Proposal Overview
Making Fractals worth playing again while making them distinct from Dungeons

Goal of Proposal
Right now there is hardly any difference between a dungeon and a fractal with the exception that for a dungeon there is a path that to be chosen by the players whereas for a fractal run, 1st fractal can be chosen by the players and other two will be chosen for them. The reward vs. time and reward vs. quality of gameplay is lamentable. So, the goal of the proposal is to make fractals interesting for the mass while keeping it engaging and challenging for the few that are trying to distinguish themselves from the mass.

Proposal
Make each fractal structured in 3 stages as follows:

Stage 1. Introductory fights with small sets of trash mob and 1 mini-champ to define the environment of the fractal. This will help establish the trait-lines, skills, equipments and party setup choices for a particular fractal. Expected time to complete – 5 minutes for a skilled team and 15 minutes for not-so-skilled ones. No penalties for failing repeatedly unlike Cliffside 3rd seal.

Stage 2. A mini puzzle/challenge to be solved by part of the team to advance to the 3rd stage of the fractal. The puzzle can be similar to uncategorized fractal staircase with laser bars and the challenge can be similar to the ascalon mobs leading to the final boss fight. Expected time to complete – 2 minutes for a skilled team and 6 minutes for Not-so-skilled ones. Must be completed by 2 out of 5 players in the team similar to Crucible of Eternity laser grid.

Stage 3. The final Boss fight – Let the final Boss have variety instead of only one version of the boss. Depending of the ability displayed by the team in stage 1 and stage 2 of the fractal, the team will face a particular variety of the final boss. Many players play the game for variety of reasons other than seeking challenging experience. However, many players like ONLY the challenge, love the leader boards, want bragging rights. So, a premade guild team seeking challenge will be able to prove that they can really deal with the challenge in stage 1 and stage 2. That means, in stage 1, an exceptional team should be able to make a time less than 5 minutes to advance to stage 2. And then complete stage 2 like pro to meet the final boss of hardest difficulty. Expected time to complete – 3 minutes for a skilled team in lowest difficulty and 7 minutes in the hardest difficulty.

Bonus Round. This round can pop anytime after a group complete the first fractal with the hardest difficulty iff all the team-members remain the same. This round will be facing the “Doppelgangers”. In this fight, the players will be fighting themselves, their arch enemies – a GW legacy. (May I propose a similar map of the Augury rock and the same room?)

Now the “HOW” part – I propose that ANET sets a fractal quality counter for each fractal. At the beginning of the fractal when the majority of the team member clicks “I am ready” similar to tourney, the counter on the UI will be set at 1000. As the players battle and puzzle thru the fractals the counter will count downwards. The final boss difficulty can be determined based on where the counter’s downtick stops. So, if we were to assume (based on internal experiment w/ player beta and data mining) that the fractal completion time for stage 1 and stage 2 will be 7 minutes for a skilled team and 21 minutes for not-so-skilled ones, we will drop the counter by 45 points per minute. If the counter reaches to zero before stage 2 is complete, players will be offered to fight a cage free organic moa so that at least they get a consolation prize of daily completion and 1 blue/green usual crap that is offered.

Now, for a skilled team the counter will stay at 685 or higher at the successful of stage 2 for the team to face the best version of the boss and the loot.

For a mediocre to decent team (90% of the population), the counter will stay at 1 or higher at the successful completion of stage 2. The team will face the “regular” boss.

Rewards – I will also propose to change the reward structure of the fractals. Rewards will be given out at the end of each fractal. As a player keeps participating in more and more fractals in one run, the rewards get better and better for the player after each successful completion. So, if a team member chooses to leave after 2nd of 3rd fractal and the rest of the team want to continue by picking another member, the staying members get rewarded for 4th level reward quality whereas the newly picked member gets 1st level reward quality. There shall be no QQ as the fractal rotations will not be based on length or difficulty as each fractal will be unique in its challenges and will have almost similar gameplay length while offering different challenges.

For hardest boss rewards, I’d remove crap from the loot table and make it limited to items that are NOT available in the game otherwise. I will propose to include Black lion claim tickets, gems, skins available only on gemstore, unique items that do not drop elsewhere, titles and achievements. The gold reward does not have to be substantial as the time to complete should not be any longer than any other variety but, the differentiators will be skill and experience that will be rewarded with unique loot.

For Doppelganger fights, I will have unique tokens as rewards that can be exchanged for another unique set of collectibles that are not available elsewhere in the game. This will motivate teams to stay together instead of abandoning at the sight of an “seemingly unfavorable” fractal in rotation or to kick a player from the team who is “seemingly bad”.

As a rule, all tokens obtained from fractals can be exchanged for any other currency in game other than gem or gold. I hope this will make this format very popular for many players.

Proposal Functionality
Current design of the fractals are similar as far as the stages go but, they will need some adjustment for length and quality to ensure we are not getting fractals like dredge which is poorly thought out disgrace to be called a fractal.

To give an example, I will take uncategorized fractal. I will start the fractal with a harpy staircase and 4 champ (rabbit, bandit, ettin and shaman) battle as the first stage. Next stage will be laser puzzle + Old Tom or a variation of it to make it more interesting. 3rd stage will be the Raving Asura fight. I will remove the second set of harpy staircase.

For another example, I will change Dredge Fractal to have the Plates+Switch room serve as stage 1. I will not have constant dredge respawn. I will not allow Jump ins or port-ins to the room. The pressure plates need to be activated as intended and players need to fight to enter thru the front gate. I will reduce number of dredges. For stage 2 I will have the canon or the bombs but, I will significantly reduce number of dredges and there will be very less respawns. I will eliminate clown car room with commie boss and Stage 3 will be the final boss. I will change some battle functionality of the final boss to make the encounter interesting rather than lengthy by increasing the HP.

Current design of GW2 already has time counters in WvW, SPVP and in various other events. Converting clock to a numeric counter will help in establishing leader boards for each fractal. If a player participated in a fractal run that reached the final boss when the counter ticked above 685, chances are that player will be on leader board till someone else tops that with a 686 or higher.

For the hardest version of the final boss I will have similar counter but, it would require exceptional gameplay to be on the leader board as hardest version of the boss should not be Pug fodder but, will require skill, coordination and communication. Think of Teq or Marionette in a small scale. I expect this boss to be Liadri-hard.

Associated Risks
There are many risks associated with any proposal. At the onset I’d say that this proposal will upset a section of the player base that will never be able to see the hardest difficulty of the final boss and, therefore, will never get the loot that the boss drops.

Another risk, if ANET sticks to its 2 blue 1 green policy for all boss fights (as if this game was made in Soviet Russia), people will not be motivated to try. So, ANET needs to think out of the box about loot table before implementing anything like this in the game.

Another risk, I know it’s a hard concept to implement doppelgangers. But, in GW ANET has already implemented it. So, implementing 5 doppelgangers on steroids should not be wayyy too difficult. It will be unique in Guild Wars kind of way too.