Guild Wars 2

I have a problem with the Fractals. My problem is how their design limits people by locking progression to the lowest common level attained.

There is a group of 3-4 people in my guild that are very good at dungeons and that loves to run them all the time. That is their core group and then there are another 3-4 people who tend to fill in the gaps. I happen to be one of the gap fillers and it’s worked out very well up till now. My character is fully decked out in exotics between crafting, zone completions and the dungeon runs I’ve been on with them. I’ve also raided in other games for many many years. So even if I’ve never seen an encounter, I can usually perform well enough with just a quick explanation.

I go with them when they have space and everyone’s has been happy. That’s all been fine up till the Fractals. Now they are level 8-9 and I’m still at level 2. So either I have to PuG Fractal levels to catch up or they have to carry me through content to get me up to their level. I’m not sure what you guys would be willing to do to fix it but as it stands Fractals are something that I would love to do more of but the system in place is preventing that. Being stuck between shafting my friends by forcing them to carry me to their level or shafting myself by standing in Lion’s Arch looking for a group still doing them at my level, to say nothing of the joys involved with pugging anything, makes the whole thing very unappealing.

start puging its not gonna change, also they are so called friends and guildmates.. they should be helping you with lvl 2 +. thats what guilds are for

this was the arbitrary gating mechanic we complained about before release. It has turned out to be as annoying and unnecessarily restrictive as we pointed out.

Ren.7539:

start puging its not gonna change, also they are so called friends and guildmates.. they should be helping you with lvl 2 +. thats what guilds are for

There is a big difference between asking for help and asking for guildmates/friends to carry me through hours and hours of content just so I could be at the point where I could help them to progress.

It’s like they took the worst aspect of WoW and decided not only to import it into this game but actually went out of their way to make it worse. I don’t care about the ascended gear being better, what I care about is that the system they have implemented is actively locking off content to the point where I have to run the treadmill just to keep up with the people I want to play with. At least in WoW there was a long span of time before your gear was so weak as to be ineffective in the current content and even then people/friends could carry your through their content if they wanted to. Fractals haven’t even been out a week and I already feel like I would have to work way too hard to catch up that it isn’t even worth it.

Denim Samurai.2379:

this was the arbitrary gating mechanic we complained about before release. It has turned out to be as annoying and unnecessarily restrictive as we pointed out.

^ This.

GW2 Team needs to change the way FoTM works… Now. As a casual player its not very “pug friendly” as it requires some skill and coordination. I can survive just fine, but other people are the problem.

But as you say, the main issue is needing to always be on the same fractal level as everyone else. Currently I’m geared to get into Level 10+ fractals but can’t because I’m stuck to level 1 with all the people < lvl 80.

IMO, copy WoW again on their good parts. Implement a Gear Level requirement. That way people with bad gear can’t get into the higher level fractals. As well, people who have a lot of spare gear to use for their alts can catch up with guildies/friends in FoTM levels 5+.

Srsly though, how did GW2 Team not see “common denominator FoTM lvl” being an issue?

I was trying to find a group earlier and am really starting to see how ridiculously bad the gating mechanic is. You get:

lfg fractals, scale 5
lfg FoTM lvl 2
lfg FOtM level 20
lfg Frac scale 9
lfl FoTM level 15

in the chat window. All of these people just want to do the same dungeon and, for all we know, they’re all level 80s chars. But they won’t actually play together and will have to keep sitting their waiting for parties because the inane gating mechanic is arbitrarily blocking players from actually playing together.

Signed. And I’ll probably sign many more posts like this… I want to do this content, but the fractal level requirement is a terrible, anti-social idea. Just chalk it up to bad judgement, fix it and move on.

I’m kinda both ways on this. Our guild is very similar, I’m in the core group of dungeon runners and we have several people who fill the gaps. We’ve ended up doing level 1 more time than I care to count because we never seem to have the exact same group of people. We are halfway considering just puging our gaps from now on except we don’t want to exclude guildies who arn’t as in to dungeons as us. Makes for an annoying situation.

Someone posted a really good compromise suggestion that seems like it would be relatively easy to implement in one of the SA threads.

One solution for fractals would be to allow anyone to do the same level as the highest person in the group but make it so lower level people don’t get the same drops. So a level 1 can run a level 15 fractal if he wants and will rank up to rank 2 if he completes it successfully but will still get rank 1 rewards and have to deal with the higher difficulty.

I think this system is extremely good. It’s good to separate “newbies” and more “elite” players. So everyone could play with people with similar skills as they have. Also, I never have any problems finding random pugs for any level, it takes minutes. Maybe your server is not very active at the times you’re trying to do your dungeons? There is also an website that servers as a “LFG tool” which allows you to find people on different servers easily.

The system is working as intented I’m not sure what people expect from a encounter that is geared for high end. It auto-levels you to 80 so that elimates the whole concept of only you can group in FotM at this lvl or that lvl. People complaining they are not getting loot but people skip mobs whenever they can. Be happy there is new content at all you paid for the base game with no subscription everything else being done is really an added bonus to enhance our playing pleasure with more to come as it did in GW1.

Shammy.5846:

The system is working as intented I’m not sure what people expect from a encounter that is geared for high end. It auto-levels you to 80 so that elimates the whole concept of only you can group in FotM at this lvl or that lvl. People complaining they are not getting loot but people skip mobs whenever they can. Be happy there is new content at all you paid for the base game with no subscription everything else being done is really an added bonus to enhance our playing pleasure with more to come as it did in GW1.

The levels we are talking about aren’t player levels, they are fractal levels.

What they are referring to is people not getting groups because fractal lvls are different. What if it didn’t scale you to 80 how many would still be doing fractals on alts or for that matter even get groups in them if they were below 80. The fact of the matter is you now have people who can access fractals at any lvl so you have a 80% increased in player pool to find groups for what ever fractal lvl you want to get into.

I’m not sure how many games I played like EQ or others alike where you did a long series of quests just to get flagged for 1 zone!!! Then you needed to progress in that zone to move to the next. They were never account based you advance on the character you progressed with only should be the same here and all other serious RPGs. Casual players aren’t meant to get Legendaries there first year or even 2 of playing. So why try and spoon feed them in fractals also put in your time like everyone else and in about a year. When all the craze is gone then open it upto the public account.
The only thing missing now is a ingame LFG system once thats in place then really nothing to complain about. But there is a web sight that does basically the same thing now so I’d check that out next time your looking for more for fractals groups.