This is kind of a rant topic, but at the some time I want to share my idea of what will happen to fractals after this update.The idea of making everyone able to do any fractal at any difficulty may seem like an awesome idea to a lot of people, especially those who haven’t done fractals yet. But, after playing up to fractal 14(or 15? I don’t remember off the top of my head), with many, MANY runs at fractal 10, I feel like this update will lead to a large amount of discrepancy with new players entering fractals.
Why? Well, lets say you knew almost nothing about the dungeon, and saw someone in LA looking for a person for fractals level 18. You haven’t done fractals before, but you’ve played several other dungeons, and you know how your specific class works. At 18, no AR will mean agony will hurt you a lot. Granted not enough to make you useless, but it will still means you will die more often than the rest of the group. You join the party, and go into the dungeon, and it is the underwater fractal. Here is where the main problem will lie. Even though this is a relatively easy fractal, you have no experience with it, and thus it takes you longer for you to understand what is happening. You can kill all the mobs with you team easily, but when you get to the piranhas section, you die constantly, and you team has to revive you. This takes time. Time your team may not want to spend reviving you. By the end of the entire dungeon, it has taken the team 30 extra minutes than normal to finish, because they had to explain everything to you when it came up.
The problem with the new fractal leveling system is not that people can’t do the dungeon because they do not know how to play. It is that they do not know what is the fastest and safest way to finish the specific fractal. I watched some videos of people doing 30+ fractals. If you went up to old tom and aggro’d him before your team sets up the tears, just see how long it takes them to to type in “/kick yournamehere”. Some people do not mind teaching you along the way, but some have a schedule to keep, and will be frustrated if it takes them an hour more to do a dungeon because someone did not know how to do something specific. When fractals first came out, I tried to do fractal 1 about a week after it came out. After the third time someone raged quit, dc’d, or just left or went afk, I started to count the amount of time I wasted doing fractal 1. I took NINE tries to finish fractal 1, and seven hours of my life in that god forsaken dungeon trying to tell people to pull the ice elemental to the lava, in the swamp trying to coordinate players, and reviving dead non-80 players we had to take to get in. Those nine hours, mind you, did not include the hours upon hours of trying to put together a fractal level 1 group. Doing fractal one took more time than doing fractals 2-9. I have had some pretty complicated CSC projects that took less time than fractal 1. More often than not, someone left because they didn’t understand what was happening, died too often, and did not know what to do.
The vast majority of people did not have the problems that I had doing early fractals, so this post will probably be moot to a lot of people, but I’m pretty those who have gotten to higher fractals than I have had people who did stupid things and caused a lot of trouble. I know in some higher fractals, they check everyone’s AR. I believe we will see something like this in lower fractals as well, starting at maybe 10, where party leaders will make you show a ring, or a pristine relic or whatever to make sure you have some understanding of how the dungeon works before letting you in the party. This will go against what Anet was trying to do with this update, but I believe it will happen, and will happen sooner rather than later. If this does happen, will fractals be considered “too elitist” for the average player?
(edited by DivinityRAGE.5498)