Guild Wars 2

Moshari.8570:

Boy do I feel like the unwanted child…..
…
In their minds its better to stay silent and hope that someday we forget what happened and live with it.

I feel the same way…
If they think staying silent is a way to make us forget what happened, they should take some psychology classes… It only adds oil on fire to purposely ignore such an issue…

Lilith Ajit.6173:

are you kittening me?
Are you seriously kittening me?

I’m not. But it seems like Anet is.
Source: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/player-vs-player-rewards-roadmap/

As the reset of PvP ranks had been used to express our feelings on our own level reset, it is interesting to see that Anet is now saying they will put out this ranking system. Yet, the way they are handling this seems quite different from the way they handle us…

Once ladders are implemented, ranks will be retired. To honor the effort that players have put into the rank system, existing players will be able to keep all unlocked rank finishers and will earn a special title based on your rank to show that you were there from the start.

Grats on finishing level 50.

To get to those 70 AR, you needed 3 +10 infusions, so 1536 +1 infusions. Given that we get at most 5 each run, and a run takes an hour for a decent group, you’d have needed 13 days to get those +1 infusions, even if playing 24h a day. Which means the only way you could have done this run, trying to get first place on leaderboard, is by buying the infusions from the Black Lion company. How much did it cost you, by the way ? At the moment those 3 infusions are at about 520 gold…

Not to trivialize what you did, but by putting such a gear-gating on the content, Anet has made their fractals leaderboard not about who’s the most skilled fractal player, but who’s the wealthiest one. Which proves those leaderboards are a joke.

Another issue I forgot about before:
If you die and then equip some AR equipment while dead, the AR will not update, you’ll have to unequip every AR piece, then reequip them again for your AR to be counted right.

You can add an issue for level 43 instability. There is no indicator of the debuffs you have, so as to know when you lose them. So you have to wait some time, and pray it was enough when you attack again. If it’s not, you have to wait again a long time after only one or two hits…
This doesn’t make the fights much harder, it just makes them quite longer.

All of the game is just for fun. By your argument, why don’t they remove gold from the whole game then ?

Why should we get punished, by no decent rewards in fractals, for playing the content we like ?

Thaddeus.4891:

Some of my best memories of Fractal was when we had max 30 AR and level 40+ Agony just kicked our kitten pushing us to be perfect and dodge everything possible because 1 single errors could lead to a party wipe. But this is the difference. We needed skill and not only gear.

With this patch, they completely changed how fractals used to be.

Before, high level fractals were a skill-check. All the gear in the game couldn’t save you if you were a bad player who couldn’t dodge. With this, AR acted as a safety net, enabling people a bit less skilled to still go to the middle-to-high levels. So for pugs, when you were grouping with someone on the higher levels, you knew he was skilled enough to support his own weight, so taking a pug wasn’t really a problem (it became less true as they released more AR. In the end I was finding more and more people who couldn’t dodge at all in my daily groups).

Now, high level fractals have become a complete gear-check. All the skill in the world will not save you if you didn’t grind to get enough AR on your gear.

I personnaly think this change is quite a bad one. Gear-grinding in itself is quite bad. But if you want to compare it with raids in other games, at least in those you can try the fights to play better, to get better positionning, to perfect your dps cycle, etc., to lower the gear requirement even by a little. Gear is still superior to skill, by far, but skill still is an important component for the fights. After this update, this is not even the case for fractals, especially with the lvl X0 instability, where you get randomly hit by agony, like every 10-15s.

JMar.3254:

For the record, I am a dedicated fractals player. I am pretty sure I should be part of the target audience.

Fixed That For You

Dahkeus.8243:

You’re not the target audience.

Who IS the target audience ?
Casual gamers ? They won’t ever play fractal enough to get on the leaderboard.
Hardcore fractal players ? They’re the ones whining the most about this leaderboard which has no real meaning and which is causing all their progress to be wiped out.

Dahkeus.8243:

I’m not arguing that the implementation of the leaderboards is right. I’m arguing that the idea of leaderboards is right.

The idea of a leaderboard is right only, and only ! if there is no cap. As Anet has clearly stated that they wanted the content to be caped forever (cap will be increased one day, but still with a new cap), putting a leaderboard is just stupid.

pho.9412:

are you one of those pugs that drag people down with 20 AR in a lvl 35 ?

AR is game mechanic it is necessary to have to do fotm.

It is not necessary at all. Back in the day, before the introduction of pristine relics, when you had to rely on stupid RNG to get your AR, I arrived to lvl 30 with only 5 AR, and i wasn’t getting down (except at Maw, ofc, but you could still survive it with some other ways). AR is only necessary to help you if you can’t dodge well enough.

durend.6237:

If the bulk of your playtime is on the weekend, you’ve lost out. If you can only play an hour or two each day, you’ve lost out.

Basically if you’re planning on anything other then sitting down to do fractals with a dedicated group for 6+ hours the next couple night you’ve probably lost out.

Title of this thread sums it up perfectly.

What the leaderboard is looking for (highest level done) is good. The problem is this stupid cap. As long as there is such a low cap, leaderboard won’t represent who’s the most skilled players (like it should), but who has the most gametime right after the patch.

And those caps will be there for a long, long time. They already said that when they open fractals for higher levels, they will only open 10 more levels at at time, therefore, there will always be a cap, therefore their leaderboard will be pointless forever…

HardRider.2980:

Err why you think they lowered the rewards for fractals? lol
However I STILL think fractal weapons should be 20+ to make them feel more epic and not another weapon.

Totally agree with that.

Silver.3284:

Every time I see this “You don’t need AR up to XX level” I am thinking that what they actually mean is “You don’t need AR up to level XX, as long as everyone else in your party has AR”

It’s not really that, more “You don’t need AR up to level XX, as long as you know the fights and what to dodge”.
Going to 19 without AR is fine, even with 0 AR you should be able to survive the agony.
20-29 is a bit trickier. Going with 0 AR at those levels can be done, but you’d need to know the fights well to know exactly when to dodge. So it’s ok for fractal veterans, not beginners, as the difficulty will become much harder.

What would be the point of more AR ? They said that the need of AR for 40-49 would be lower than it is for now. And we already have way too much AR for those levels. Since the first groups did those levels, AR has almost doubled. So if the need for AR is lower than before, giving us AR would be pointless.

We gave some ideas about forms of recognition they could offer (titles for level previously acheived for example) before in the thread, as it’s obvious that they won’t back down from resetting our levels. But at the very least, a dev posting here to show that they have at least some form of concern to our situation is needed. It’s been 4 days already that they’ve been “collecting feedback”, as the Community coordinator said. In those 4 days, there’s been multiple threads, over 1600 posts written, but no one has come here to state their opinion over this (and as it’s week-end now, nobody won’t for a while…). Do we have to wait for their stream monday to question them about it for us to finally have an answer ? This is quite sad.

If you’d have to spend hundred of hours to unlock those waypoints, maybe you would see our point…

phys.7689:

Many people would simply skip anything in the middle, especially if it is difficult, Take for example almost every single dungeon and fractal run, where you run by/ignore/go around the most difficult fights/mechanics.

I have to disagree with you on this, because people WILL skip the difficult levels anyway.

As long as they still let us launch any level we want with friends, if the level 46 for example is pretty hard, but 47 is ok, what stops anyone from making an LFG like this : “LFG 4 more for 47 (need someone to open)” ? As long as one group make it, they can then allow everyone to bypass the difficult point.

If the difficulty doesn’t go crescendo with each level, you can be pretty sure you’ll see this.

But some features are quite problematic:
- Account bound level and rewards. I have no problem with account bound level in itself, but it doesn’t give us much, as we could already reroll on an alt anytime we wanted. Account bound reward, on the other hand, means doing more than one fractal a day will give probably give us crappy reward, so a waste of time. This gives 2 problems: first to the hardcore players, who were doing 4-6 runs a day with our alts. Guess i can now cut my game time in half. But also to other players. When we do 4-6 runs, we don’t always do it with guildies or friend list. I usually did one run with friends, others i was pugging. Now, if i do only one run, i won’t pug at all, and i won’t be the only one to do so. That’s a loss of available players to complete the higher levels for people who don’t have a big friendlist, and finding players at higher levels on pug will probably be much harder than before.

- Exclusive reward for higher levels being a tonic, while the weapons (which were, back in the day, said by Anet to be rare “on purpose”, so that having them could have some meaning to fractal players) are made available at 10 now (20 before).

- Fractal weapons becoming skins (this is good), not being retroactive (this is bad). Let’s hope they give us an npc to trade our old weapons against new skins, like they did with the infinite gathering tools, but i’m quite afraid they’ll force us to buy gems for transmutation crystals…

- Level cap and unlimited AR. That’s just gear-gating. Where did the “Skill > Stuff” go ? :’(

- Level reset.
They could have handled this much much better. First, they present it like it’s needed to have a fair competition in the leaderboard. So let’s talk about the leaderboard. What will it record ? I can’t see anything recorded that would have a meaning. Best time ? Nobody would ever allow anything but guardian, warrior and mesmer in their teams (maybe one thief to gain some time by skipping some packs ?). And I personnaly don’t think doing a perfect run has anything to do with speed. Especially in a dungeon with random maps. Lowest number of down state ? In the end, everyone tied at 0. Most mobs killed ? Dredge + Ascalon + Colossus = I win. Highest AR ? So that the one on top is the one who’s allowed to not dodge and just tank the damage like a noob ?The only thing which would have a meaning is highest level beaten. But it only has meaning if there’s no cap on the fractal level. If you cap it, everyone will be tied at first place in the end.

So the reason they use to justify the reset our level is just pointless as it is. Like Wethospu and others said before, why not let us keep our level ? If the difficulty is too high (and we hope it is), we’ll just wipe and go below to a level we can clear.

If they really insist on resetting us, then they really need to work on their PR skills. What most of us is asking as a compensation for this reset is not that much. What we want is some recognition from Anet. For months, we farmed some of the most buggy content in the game (harpies going invulnerable, npc at ascalonian fractal not always rezzing with us after a full wipe, the endless clown car filled with five hundreds dredges, …), and we almost never got any answer to those problems.

Wiping our progress like this, with nothing given in exchange, with not even giving any answer at all after multiple threads and more than 1500 posts on them, is really telling us that we don’t matter at all. We should just shut up and forget about it ? Like I said before, it’s like telling us that we wasted hundreds of hours of our time for nothing (and before someone said we got rewards, we could have gotten at least ten times more by farming CoF like most people did).

Edit: Sorry for double post, but message was too long…

phys.7689:

3)This is important, the current perception based on the blog, is that they feel like this isnt a big deal, it doesnt need to be discussed, or dealt with. It strongly leads you to believe they are stating, this is the way its going to be, and it doesnt really matter how you feel about it. I think this is bad, if the company truely wants to make a evolving game, they will have to consider this key issue, how to deal with how people feel about what is gone. In LS they tend to give achievements, and unique items. They need to consider how to make the content they pass out the world not leaving gaping holes for their users

This is mostly it.

What we wanted from this fractal patch we were waiting for almost 10 months is quite simple:
- correct the bugs in the fractals (invulnerable harpies, etc.)
- trying to make the maps more balanced (reduce length of dredge for ex)
- a way to get the skin you want without being totaly dependant on luck (a friend got the weapon he needed as his 40-50th drop…)
- some new maps if possible
- enabling higher levels, if possible even higher difficulty than actual lvl 80

Some of this was including in this patch. But some of the things go in the wrong direction, like the cap at 50. Fractals is a very good dungeon because it has levels. That way, people can try to challenge themselves, and go to the level range they find ok for them. Some will want easy runs and stay at low levels, some will want some difficulty and will go at the middle range, and some want to challenge themselves, to go the highest possible. Right now, the problem is the cap is preventing the ones who want to challenge themselves to do so. Level 80 is hard, but it is still far from the limits of the best players, like some people proved it with videos (archdiviner 1vs1, grawl shaman naked, dredge suit 2vs1, …). We hoped we would be able to challenge ourselves with the release of this patch, and we fear we won’t be. If the difficulty scaling has “a slighly less difficult curve” than before, level 50 will most likely be easier than old 80.

We’ll have to see if the new “instabilities” will make the runs interesting, we can’t have any opinion on it as nobody has any info about it. But to people who think high level fractals was exactly the same thing than lower levels with just higher level mobs, it just wasn’t that way. The damage taken was so high that different strategies had to be used, that you needed to understand things that didn’t matter at all at lower levels. How many groups did I taught that golems on asura fractals had to be killed in a specific order if you didn’t want the remaining ones to get a powerful buff…

Anyway, i can understand why they would choose to begin this at level 30, as it is a level that should be attained with relative ease by most people who focus a bit on it.

It’s not what the level grant us, it’s what it represents. It represent our dedication to fractals, the hundreds of hours we spent playing it. Much like a WvW or a PvP title, or some Legendaries on a character would represent.

Resetting it without any form of compensation or recognition of our dedication is like telling us: “you were idiots to spend so much time playing this part of our game, you should have stopped at level 30 and do CoF p1 to farm gold like everybody else.” This is quite insulting…

As for harder content being given… They’re not resetting the level 30 players, which should mean that new 30 should be about as difficult as old 30. And they said the difficulty curve would be “slightly less difficult”, so if the curve is smoother, level 50 difficulty will probably be less difficult than old 80. If that is the case, which it most probably is, we’ve been waiting for 10 months ! for a patch that would enable us to go to a harder difficulty, and what we get is a reset of our progress and lesser (although a bit different) difficulty ? And you still don’t understand how we could be kitten ed by that ?

Manuhell.2759:

PvP was all about competition and fighting for the top of the leaderboard, though. Fractals never encouraged that.

Yeah, right… When they released a dungeon with “infinite progression”, that was not encouraging us at all to go the further we can…

Manuhell.2759:

And isn’t your point of view selfish as well? You’re asking to retroactively reward something they never intended to reward just because you and some other spent a lot of time on it, after all.

With what I say, nobody lose anything, some people gain a bit.
With what you say, nobody gain anything, some people lose something.

And i’m the selfish one ? Jealousy knows no bound…

So, what you’re saying is it’s better to not give any recognition to people who have put hundreds of hours playing fractals, because people who didn’t play fractals could be jealous of this recognition, saying they may have decided to go for it too had they known beforehand ?

Seems to me like those people you’re advocating for are playing only for the reward, and just because they may be jealous, we should get nothing when the level we dedicated hundreds of hours of playing is just being wiped out ? That’s quite a selfish point of view…

How would that be unfair ? We’re not asking for achievment points or anything, just a title. Or are you saying people who didn’t care about fractals enough to level in it should be able to get a fractal title too ? oO

Your argument is like saying people who didn’t play gw1 should get HoM titles…

Like was said a few pages ago, what we’re asking is just some form of recognition for what we accomplished, in the form of a title for example.

I fail to see how that would affect negatively the rest of the community…

Lilith Ajit.6173:

Karma is a very good point. Maybe anet could give those who reached high levels like a birthday boost like thing for karma. 24 hours boost to karma?

I’d much rather get something exclusive and permanent like a title, than some karma i could go farm in a few hours.

Patrikan Habaton.2548:

Already told the maybe best and simplest solution is unique titles that are soulbound.

Easy to implement and everyone gets a title for each 10 levls completed so ( 40 , 50 , 60,70,80) a remark here you should have all titles if you are at 80 or so so you can choose because sometimes some titles are cooler than others.

This is, in my opinion too, the best we can get in such a short time.

For a more middle to long term:
We want fractals to be what it was said it would, something “endless” (well, at least high enough), so that we can challenge ourselves to our limits, not limits imposed on us by stuff or arbitrary decision from devs. Old level 80 was clearly harder than lower levels, but it was still far from being the limits of top players. This has been shown by numerous videos, where bosses at 80 got defeated by subpar teams (DnT duo-ed dredge suit, we killed shaman while naked on alts, …). So please, let us go as far as we can, don’t cap us on such a low cap like before.

This would also give some meaning to the leaderboard that is being implemented. The only meaningful thing this could record (not dependent on random map or specific team composition) is highest level beaten, and it can only mean something if there is no cap on the level you can open (or everyone will be 1st, tied at the cap).

We are not against a fractal patch. Hey, we were the ones most enthousiastic about it before tuesday, we’ve been waiting for a fractal patch since january !

But we can’t be happy when we see some of the features of this patch :
- Level reset. This is like telling us we just wasted all our time, for absolutely nothing. It’s a spit in the face, to the people most dedicated to fractals.
- Leaderboard with no meaning
- Fractal weapons at 10: those weapons were the way to show our dedication to fractals. Giving them to an even lower level than before makes it impossible for us to show our dedication to this area of the game. Most other aspects have ways to show their dedication (ennemies see your rank in WvW, finishers for sPvP, for example). Fractal players only had weapons (and the level they could open)
- New fractal weapons will be skins and no more weapons. This is a good thing, no more transmutation crystals wasted. But they said it won’t be retroactive. So what do i do with all the weapons i have stored in bank ? Just cry and buy 1600 gems to use them on my alts ?
- Exclusive reward for HL, a tonic ! We’re so happy ! If they had put the tonic reward at level 10 and the weapons at 40, I think it would have been better.

There’s only one true thing they could record on their leaderboard which would have a meaning : highest level attained.
Other things would be quite pointless… Best time ? Completely depends on which maps you’ll get on rotation, and best time would force people on specific professions.

But for highest level attained to have a meaning, you must not make any cap on level, or you’ll have a ton of people tied at first place. So, putting a leaderboard, and a hard cap at the same time… I just can’t understand them…

Penguin.7906:

I have like 30 skins i’ll never use because transmutation cost is way too high.

I have 45 on stock at the moment, not counting those already transmutated on my main. To equip those on my alts, that would amount to almost 1600 gems, or 120 gold for the moment.
So I’d be very happy if it was possible to implement the same thing that was done for infinite gathering tools, to exchange the old item for the new skin.

To get back on topic, i completely agree that skin acquirement needs to stay hard.

We have pages and pages of feedback. Some of it is just ranting, some just blind defense of the patch, but in the middle there have been some constructive things said. Moshari posted a list of thing on page 14 of the old post, there was an article describing how we feel in this situation posted on page 15 of same post, etc.

Of course, we can understand that it takes some time for the developpers to process all this feedback, but as the patch day goes closer and closer, we feel like our feedback will not be heard in time.

It’s quite funny how the post was closed just after we asked for someone from Anet to respond, to at least know they’re still reading. Now we know they’re reading. But listening ? That’s another thing…

Moshari.8570:

I honestly think that what bothers me the most about this thread is simply the lack of ANET involvement.

People are getting really angry (I admit, I myself did). And not a single post to at least acknowledge that they are still reading this.
a sentence like “we ARE reading this thread and both sides of the argument” would probably go a long way towards making people feel less helpless in ANET enacting this change (and as such, reduce anger and increase constructive discussion).

Quoted for truth.

Most of us were on alts for this fun run, including me (elementalist on the video) and Bart (recorder). As i almost never play my elementalist, i’m pretty sure i have a crappy build (it is months old, never change it), and it’s not a secret that i have no mastery of this profession.

To be honest, we expected the fight to be harder than that without armor, especially with not mastered alts, but it went much more smoothly than we thought.

Protoavis.9107:

Things change in MMO’s all the time, this includes rewards, acting like those things are being taken from your account is juvenile and comes across like a 5 year olds tantrum.

This has already been posted a bit earlier, but i suggest to read it, and you’ll hopefully understand why we react this way.
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaminShokrizade/20130531/193353/The_Barrier_to_Big.php

What Patrikan said (correct me if i’m wrong), we don’t want something valuable for compensation, we want something rare, something no one else but those who achieved those same old levels to have, to be able to show we were there before.
Moshari posted a few things before (here or on the main post in general discussion, can’t remember) about what it could be, like a specific title, specific skin, etc.

And i second the link TPMN posted, that article describes what we’re living here pretty accurately.
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaminShokrizade/20130531/193353/The_Barrier_to_Big.php

I think extra chests is a bad idea. We lost a permanent progress, giving us a one-time chest is not a good thing. It’s not like fractal players were playing for money or chest rewards anyway…

Something more permanent, like a title or a skin variation, which we could then keep forever, in place of our lost progress, would be way better.

Abramelin.7356:

Anyone who wants to progress in an MMO, whether it be by accumulating gold, going up in PVP or WVW ranks, or accumulating gear, needs to know that any progress achieved is secure. Anet’s reset here undermines my trust in the security of any progress, not just that in fractals.

There is a good article on this concept here, which the author refers to as equity:

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaminShokrizade/20130531/193353/The_Barrier_to_Big.php

Pretty good article, and it’s quite right about this subject.

It’s like telling us “You wasted your time doing all those fractal runs”.

They said they changed the scaling of difficulty. By this argument, 1-30 is not the same as new 1-30, then why not reset everyone to 1 ?

ozma.3498:

They also said there was infinite progression. In fact, they’ve said so many things that they’ve gone back on it’s quite remarkable

By the way, they’re still saying it… The new trailer they released says on youtube:

Enter the improved Fractals of the Mists, an endless dungeon experience for the brave and skilled!

What is the point to reset us to level 30 anyway. They said the difficulty for new level 30 will be different than old 30. If that’s true, why are they letting players who are only lvl 30 at that level, if it’s harder they may not even be able to do it.

If they want the “competition to begin in earnest”, why not reset everyone to level 1 then, it’s the best way to ensure everyone can go to the real level he can play.

The answer is easy. If they did that, they’d have a bash-storm on forums and IG. They chose to reset to level 30 just because most players are around those levels or lower, and wouldn’t complain much.

Players dedicated to fractals, who should be the most enthousiastic about a fractal patch (hey, we were waiting for it for 10 months!), are completely thrown away, like our opinion didn’t matter at all… For 10 months, we were saying that Anet had no love for fractals and the players dedicated to it. They just proved us right.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Unfortunately the change doesn’t apply to items that have already been acquired. Ultimately that’s what I wanted but there was a pretty severe technical limitation on this.

Can’t you do the exact same thing you did for the gathering tools last patch ? Put an npc with which we can trade our old fractal weapons with the new ones ?

It’s quite sad that the ones who are most disappointed by this release are the players who played fractal the most…

It should make people understand that this is not the right thing to do for a fractal patch…

You can count it in days of playing time over a period of weeks, or even months, not just dozens of hours…

Of course we react pretty badly when Anet tells us we just wasted all that time, and throw everything we worked for to the trash bin.

Same here, we better still have a +10 AR back, or Anet should give us back our 250 ecto

If they had wanted to really cap fractals, they should have made it impossible to launch a level higher than 49. They never did that.

So they don’t have to punish us for progressing when they’re the ones who let it be possible. We wasted weeks of time with completely crappy rewards, and now they bash us to the ground with absolutely nothing to compensate ?

Depends what you call an exploit. Before January, it was completely possible to go to 80 without exploiting.

After that, all you needed was someone to open the level for you (you can decide if you’d call that an exploit or not), and you could progress without exploiting the maps or fights at all.

If they give us account bound level, they will surely make the chest account bound too. Which is why i hope it stays the way it is right now.