Guild Wars 2

The level system in fractals of the mists is dysfunctional, instead of bringing players together it is pulling them apart and as I mention in the title, is splitting our guild up. I think instead of the dungeon mechanic being to take the level acquired by the lowest level player (the reason for all the splitting up of people) it should take the level acquired by the person who is currently the highest (this would prevent all the negative impact the fractuals are having on our guild and the GW2 community as a whole). I urge you Arenanet to seriously consider this as the current situation is deplorable.

Then people would just group with higher levels to skip up. I think an easy fix would be not having your level reset upon doing a lower level fractile.
edit: That would completely fix it though, but at least some people would help out lower lvls.

Navzar.2938:

Then people would just group with higher levels to skip up.

If content is so unfun and unrewarding that there is large incentive to skip it, maybe it is bad content. The thing is, in this case it this isn’t true. People would still do lower level fractals because they’re good farming spots and the dailies per tier are different, not to mention the difficulty differences would find people naturally settling into certain levels to farm currency.

I’m fine with difficulty or even a gear check being a progression mechanic, but having every single person required to tier up is tedious and doesn’t do anything beneficial in terms of game design. It doesn’t even act as a good timesink or gate to higher loot, it just fractures the population.

Even something like average group fractal level would be vastly superior to the current system of locking everything down to the lowest level person. Oh nos, guilds could use 5 level 30 fractal runners to bring a newbie into a high-level fractal. A newbie that doesn’t have the gear to survive agony because agony is a valid gated progression system that actually has function. A newbie that would get significantly more currency farming lower level fractals faster and with less difficulty. What a travesty it would be to reward their hard work getting to level 30 with the extra difficulty of carrying an ungeared guildie.

It’s not about it being unfun, its that many people will want to skip up for better rewards. And since only the boss has agony, they’ll do it anyway. Besides, that still means skipping the first 10 at least, and skipping content over all.

Navzar.2938:

It’s not about it being unfun, its that many people will want to skip up for better rewards.

That would make tons of sense if the rewards were much better for the difficulty, which they aren’t. At worst you’d have people getting into T2 groups just for the daily and then going back to grinding T1 for currency.

The progression system would make more sense if it was gating a massive reward increase, but it isn’t. The locks do nothing beneficial.

If the rewards aren’t getter better than I suppose it doesn’t matter, but then why aren’t people repeating lower lvl fractils? o.O

Fractals won’t reset upon doing them at a lower lvl lol.

Here is why people don’t do lower lvl fractals:

1-9 No ascended drops (except for the vial), low exotic drop
10-19 Ascended ring drops, medrium exotic drop
20-29 etc

I’ve noticed this in my guild.

I don’t know if it’s “large”, but we had around 75 on during the event on Sunday, and our membership, which had reach 500, then dropped to 250 (after a laborious process of finding out who the inactives are), and is now back up to around 350.

I ran 4 people through their first fractal last night (and 3 of them through their first dungeon ever in GW2), and someone else did the same. But honestly, I’d rather have been able to run them through a level 9 instead, as there’s no difference (that I noticed) between 1 and 9.

I’ve completed 10 a few times, but as of last night only 1 other person in my guild has, so it’s a bit of a process of leveling other guild mates up.

Given the nature of the DCs (have had a few people who’s only experiences with fractal 1 have been bad ones, and they simply are avoiding them) leaving you to 4 man or start over, and given the difficulty of finding a group for your level, I’ve noticed quite a few people dissatisfied with the fractals in my guild. I would be one of them.

I would be tempted to redo them, just calling each 9 level bracket a tier, and then having the 10th, 20th, 30th, etc, be something like a test.

Just make it so that you have to do the 1-9 bracket 9 times to be able to do 10, then 11-19 bracket 9 times to do 20, etc.

Now I don’t know how Agony works 10+ (have never attempted 11), but 1-9 I noticed no difference in difficulty, and no increase in quality of drops. If 11-19 are the same – just go with that being a bracket.

The Fractals have simply Fractured the player base, and while occasionally I don’t mind helping lower fractal levels leveling up (2 of the 4 I ran through last night in 1 were below level 50 even), if I am going to have, at max, 3 hours a night (given work), I know I’m going to do a 10+ for a daily chest every day, and only then will I take time to level others – and with a 3 hour window, that’s 2, 3 max, complete runs (given LFG time and the possibility of poor groups and/or DCs).

The problem with the system is its current design, progression leads to greater rewards, however progression is limited by the lowest lvl in the group. Now I really dont see a huge issue, as you need a kitten ton of tokens for back piece, so running lower lvl factals doesn’t bother me at all. However, in the event I would like to progress….

Fractal lvls should scale to the highest member, which wouldn’t segragate the community and allow casuals to join in. The key is they only get credit for completing the fractal lvl they are currently at, however rewards would be for the fractal they are currently running.

Hopefully that all makes sense, that way ALL players advance their progression equally, chance for loot at higher tiers is possible for ALL, and there wouldn’t be this mass segragation you’re seeing now. Everyone wins, hardcore players get their loot chance and still progress, casual players get to play with their friends(also get a shot a decent loot and progression), and we wont have segregated groups within guilds or communities. A caveat to that, if you are running a higher tier than you progressed to, you daily chest reward should reflect your current tier. So in this system if a lvl 2 fractal person, is running fractal lvl 12 with his buddies. ALL mob drops would be for fractal lvl 12, however the chest drops scale to his lvl 2 progression. The beauty is that at the end of run, his friends are at lvl 13 and he is at lvl 3, everyone progresses, everyone can participate, everyone gets loots, and to get to the higher tier is just a matter of continuing to run the dungeon successfully. Instead of trying to find 4 other people that are at your progression level.

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