Sorry about the long post, maybe a bit offtopic, but answering Nike question:
I don’t know the details, but my general scuttlebutt understanding is that it shouldn’t have been possible to get above Rank X (see, I’m so ignorant I don’t even know what the ‘intended’ cut-off even was). So some part of my usually justice-minded self thinks “Screw those exploiters. Screw them into the ground.”
I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t know if that’s right. But I do know that unless I really stop to consider it, that what I unthinkingly feel.
Help me understand better. You may have more allies than you think.
Back when Fractals were introduced, the dungeon was presented as an endless dungeon, where the challenge would increase as you gain access to higher levels. So, people faced this challenge, trying to go as high as possible. Back then, the maximum AR was 30, so you couldn’t survive agony at level 40+. But on every map (except Maw), you could still dodge the agony if you concentrate enough. So people looked for ways to survive Maw agony. On level 40-48, it was easy. 2 guardians who chained tome of courage with the right timing could make the team survive. After that, it became harder, and different teams used different strategies. Some continued with the “not dying” way, with multiple skills (necro death shroud to survive long enough to revive a downed guy with the rez signet, etc.), while some went to the “die and rez” way, with either rez orbs or rez by a ranger pet. This is what was called exploiting by some players. However, how do you define the exploit ? How do you know that using a chain of Tome of courage is a smart way of doing it, and using death shroud to survive long enough to do a rez signet is not a smart thing, but an exploit ?
People continued that way all the way to 80. Then, after finishing level 80, they saw that they couldn’t open a level 81 fractal. So it was asked directly in the forum (dungeon section) if it was a bug, or if a cap was intended. This was never answered, until, more than a month later, a patch was made to put a hard cap at fractal level 50. Fractals over 50 could still be opened, but the agony on Maw was upped (around 200k per tick) so that nobody could survive it, and agony was reapplied when you rally, so the “die and rez” way was impossible too. When this change was made, Anet said they never intended for people to get this high, as they wanted people to go higher only when they would release more AR.
As it was still possible to open levels 50+, some people saw it as Anet acknowledging the possibility that players would continue to level to 80, and as no clear statement was made against that, some continued to level by only doing odd levels, therefore escaping the Maw instant-death.
Then, 10 months later, Anet puts a reset on fractal levels, bringing everyone back to 30. This was very badly received by the fractal players, as nothing was offered to compensate for our loss. For months, we were mostly ignored (no answer on many bugs, like harpies going invulnerable, or balance issue, like the dredge spawning tank), and a patch which should have been designed for fractal players was instead hitting us quite badly. Our feedback on this update, and the reset, was also ignored for almost 4 weeks, until Izzy finally said something about it in this thread.
As was said before in the Fractured subforum, as well as here, many of us can understand the developpers seeing a need to do a reset, to put the instabilities in the fractals. But seeing the level we worked for many hours over months vanishing without any form of compensation was a very big blow. And seeing how the Fractured patch changed fractals was another one.
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