Guild Wars 2

What is it about fractals that has driven so many players from this game?

They haven’t done enough drugs to appreciate the art. In all seriousness though, I have no idea, I love the idea.

Well if they have’t driven some to leave the game, they’ve certainly chased people out of all the zones. The zones are sad ghost towns now that everyone is treadmilling ascended gear. :(

I’ve seen the talk of Disconnection issues and not being able to rejoin I was just curious if there was more to it than this.

I really never dc but I can see how this could be lame for your party if you lose 1,2,3 players doing end game content.

Ascended gear I would assume? Basicly that you can get better gear to use in wvw by farming pve for ages.

One thing I just remembered though. I hate going to LA and automatically getting stuck in overflow. They really should have put fractals in a different spot. :l

It killed the world more than it was already dead, that’s my issue anyway. And the DC issue is extremely annoying, you end up having to quit 70% through the dungeon because 1 of your friends can’t rejoin. How did they not see that coming?

If you don’t want to do any dungeons you are free to play a dead game, may as well just go back to GW1 for that because you can do all content with a group of heroes.

Think your assumption is wrong. Fractals has not driven many from the game.

Most people who stop playing just get bored. The trend was starting even before fractals even existed. Imho it is because guilds have no meaning and people don’t feel connected. There is no group to fight for and PvP becomes goal-less. Worlds are too big a unit to feel loyalty to.

Its that Fractals with all its bugginess has made the world obsolete and makes the other dungeons look really really bad due to how fun it is. Oh and how you need do it for ascended gear as well :/

Oh and the whole disconnection issue as well.

They took the population and located it in one spot LA.
They then gated that content via agony.
They also splintered the groups via frac level.

That is just the dungeon:
Now the grind they said wouldnt be there wow – now one hell of a grind for gear.
BIS gear located in 1 spot only dungeon (no,no)
The fact they actually released new tier of gear when people were led to believe the focus was on horizontal progression.
Then they nerfed all the loot drops except the frac dungeon.
I think you get the idea of how this is going and why people are upset and left.

Thank you all for your feedback I appreciate it and look forward to hearing more on this matter.

Let’s see:

Content that gets boring after the first time you run it.
Unbalanced progression going from faceroll to brickwall.
Agony and making it kittening unavoidable, hi Maw.
AR gear costing a kittenton of t6 and ectos (because there hardly weren’t enough ecto and t6 bottlenecks already and we can’t lose a single iota of our gem profits)
BiS only from fractals at a high enough level.
Imbalanced difficulty between fractals themselves (I’m looking at you dredge).
Unable to join after disconnect.
Bugs, bugs, BUGS! It’s like they never kittening tested it at all.
Focusing on removing “gamebreaking” “sploits” such as skipping that one pack in the Charr fractal instead of actually fixing the kittening bugs.
Only entrance is in LA of all places leading to overflowed overflows.
kitten loot. I LOVE clearing the kittenty fractals they made just to get 3 blues.
RNG, RNG, RNG! Thanks for the worthless rings, I love them taking my back space. I also love wasting 225 tokens for no other good reason than to progress in this kittenfest.
Unforgeable unsalvageable unsellable pink rings that don’t even drop reliably.

Our static group gave up on this kittenfest until everything is fixed.

Oh, and it seems that salvaging dungeon rares now gives less ectos than before the confirmed stealth nerf a few days back. Thanks for that.

Iehova.9518:

Bugs, bugs, BUGS! It’s like they never kittening tested it at all.

This I am wondering about now from the start of GW2, the most basic functionality like chat containing serious bugs that you wonder if they try it let alone test it.

Though the OP states that loads of people leave because of fractals. I say that that is not true. For 1 they leave for other reasons (like boredom) and 2 they don’t leave at all, but servers seem empty because everyone is stuck in the dungeons.

I read a quote where the GM confirms that “Full” means that the max number of people are actively playing. So, people are not leaving. You just don’t see them because of instances and because of world size.

Honestly, when I heard of the idea of Fractals, I thought it was an amazing idea, infinite levels, gets harder as you progress, area for party to take a break and sell/repair in between levels…

In my head, I imagined you could keep progressing until your party quits, random dungeon levels with a random 3-4 paths, like reaching the top of a tower with many obstacles. Floor 1 cleared, Floor 2 cleared… on and on. And it would get harder, based on enemy mechanics, not gated “agony”. Your party could keep going forever until they decide to come back to a rest area or to quit the dungeon. That sounds so epic… and challenging…

But, it’s not like that… go in, do 3-4 instances, exit, repeat. And then there’s Fractal levels, where it splits up players.

lehova nailed it on the head.

Simple answer, just reading this forum, even more playing a bit:
If players was enough bored of gw2 before geargrind update, ended up forced by tons of reasons.
Geargrind in a game sold as not geargrind based, made fans and who buy a game with a bit of brain choosing this game on what the advertisement say, not paid by daddy, leave/ ask a refund

Agony, splitting the community.
One single place where farm ascended gear trillion times, growing without a sense clones of the ring you don’t need, chasing the ring you want, loads of ascended mats without a meaning, when capacitor is crafted, and an endless number of tokens. When you bough capacitor, upgrade of it, all bags, except if planning a legendary, buying shards, what we should do with them?

A new exciting map!!! Lost shores, an abandoned junk project in the same state of launch without a minimal reason to go there except a quick gathering for daily and farm T6 mats of the only DE available, hoping noone turns commendations so we farm more mats.

Over bugged patches, releasing new junk ingame, making dungeons unplayable (finally coe path 1 is fixed huh), even fractals unplayable plus DC (cliffside’s bugs, with the funniest 5 players caged forcing to leave). Triggering old bugs (sound bug doing a siren until client is closed is back). I didn’t knew i was a QA beta testers, i want a salary now lol.

TP without control, the company simply ignore where TP holes are and patch appropriately to increase by 200% that mat, stabilizing it. Precursors included.

The endgame, a legendary. Just a matter of follow some cheats/exploits/ methods/goldsellers and you’re done. Nothing to be proud of, except being a lifeless/ goldseller customer etc. Funniest clowns are players with 3+ legendaries lol , i met a couple recently , talking about who paid less the goldseller

Dev team ignoring the community, ending up (as we saw on other games) on a shrugs, leaving.

Let’s not mention junk design ending up on a dev sandbox. (picture attached, maw’s fight, falled and intead of die, swimming, not allowed to touch the surface).

Full diciture is a fake and not real time. Who didn’t left for the reason i wrote ( and i didn’t cover all of them), log a couple hours for a quick 20+30 daily chasing his ring, 20 more minutes for gathering at lost shores and get his jug, then logoff. You will still be illuded to be on a fullpower server always full of active players, it’s not.
And frankly, when you get both rings you need, and you did the capacitor yet (if so fond on it), why the hassle to log back.
Doing what. A daily?

Thank you all for your feedback I appreciate it and look forward to hearing more on this matter.

YW. Except the only one who care of this thread are mods, reading every post with a ban button in case you was a bit over rules and shuts your mouth for some days.
No dev is gonna read this thread, nor any other, except rare pearls.

Fractals was fun at first,but after doing it like 200 times and getting almost everything that u want and seeing the same lvls again and again, it becomes FarmsVille.
I am at lvl 32, and I stopped playing fotm for like a week and went to arah…oh wait, ppl farm there too…
Now I went to do Coe.?.looking for new challenges. But wait,a-net really puts emphasis for rng everywhere u go.

The biggest problem with fractal is the reward system. Having the best stat items tied to fractal is what’s forcing everyone and their grandmothers to run it over & over again. Some may claim the stat difference is insignificant, BUT having all 3 pieces of ascended gears together (1 back piece + 2 rings) do make a difference in other parts of the game (eg wvw). If this doesn’t get addressed in tomorrow’s patch, then it shows that no one in Anet has any sense of urgency to solve this.

1 – RNG
2 – Grind
3 – Bugs
4 – NO reenter before DC
5 – Level of dungeon
6 – Problem to find group in later dungeons

For me is just the DC problem…

I’m currently kitten off because we have to live in constant fear that we get the buggy as kitten Cliffside level and have to restart because it will almost definitely be faster than trying.

Also, disconnects.

Personally, fractals lured me back to doing dungeons again, namely because of the ascended gear.

Also, I’ve made more money from doing fractals than I have from grinding, mainly from the rares I get e.g. the Jade Maw chest usually gives me at least 2 rares (with no magic find) whereas grinding for awhile gives me nothing…

EDIT: I like that you get a sense of progression and it gets more challenging even though many would question their merits.

I think fractals is generally not too bad, and a lot of people are still eager to do it, even just from looking at gw2lfg.com.

On the whole, I like fractals. However, there is a glaring issue with how fractals work: the level system and RNG for AR gear both conspire to fracture regular groups.

If you have a group of friends that you play with on a regular basis, you are virtually guaranteed to reach a point where the group has to split up at some point because one or more players will have different amounts of AR. Those with better luck are able to progress while those with worse luck cannot, and the group is left with the choice of sticking together and banging their heads against the same levels over and over or splitting up.

Over a long enough timeline, the group will always eventually split up, and with the drop rates being as poor as they are, there’s a good chance that the group will be stuck waiting beyond that point before everyone gets the drops they need.

The fractals themselves are good. I find them very challenging and rewarding.

The issues people have with them are that they brought vertical progression to the game. Ever since the start it’s been assumed that exotics were as good as it gets, best of the best. Then they added ascended gear that is significantly stronger compared to exotics.

So people aren’t thrilled about a new tier for gear.

Then there’s the RNG element. Pretty much everything you would want from fractals is dropped by RNG. Want to make a back piece? RNG to get a vial. Want to infuse it? You need either 5 vials or a glob, RNG. Fractal weapons? RNG. Ascended rings? Once a day you can do a level 10 daily for a chance to get a ring, and if you DO get a ring, you have to hope it’s the one with the stats you want cause if not then you have to either use a ring with undesirable stats, or stick with your exotics until you get a new ascended ring. I know people who have done the level 10 daily 12+ times without getting any rings, meanwhile I’ve gotten 2 rings in 3 tries.

The issue that if someone disconnects during the dungeon, they don’t get to rejoin the party.

Finding a group for a specific fractal level can be very difficult, I’m on 13 right now and it’s been fairly tough finding a group.

The grind. If you want an ascended back there are two ways to get one. One requires farming 1850 fractal relics. Best way to farm them is to get to higher levels of course. 1850 relics is a LOT of fractal runs. The other way is with 250 tier 6 mats, 50 ectos, and a vial. 250 tier 6 mats and 50 ectos is a significant amount of gold. Some of the backs can even get to 60+ gold.

Pretty much whatever needs to be said, has been said. Doing fractals daily has become simply obnoxious for me. Still haven’t gotten a single ring. All I ever seem to get is bag’s of golds (silver really) or something else irrelevant. I think maybe I’ve salvaged 6-8 ecto’s out of all the daily’s combined.

I’m thinking blasting through level 1 with Magic Find might be smarter move at this point. For the drops from mobs might be more rewarding, even with the Magic Find bug.

Either way, it’s turning people off and not even making Anet money. Because the items cannot be purchased reasonably. There’s NO WAY I’d buy gems to cover the cost of all the ecto’s and mat’s to forge these items.