Is the current developer-designed gate to pugging Tier 4 Fractals good enough?

With the current Fractal system, the only gates to Tier 4 are

1. Personal fractal level (which can be circumvented by forming a party with a friend who has a higher level and then leeching into LFG)
2. Agony resist totaling to a required maximum 150 AR for all Tier 4 content.

• With the ability to reach 150 agony resist being so cheap right now, along with the ability to craft ascended gear if you throw enough gold at it,the developer's gate of (1) and (2) are pointless. Design-wise: It feels like nothing is preventing players who don't understand individual fractal mechanics from reaching Tier 4.

You used to have to learn the fractal from lower tiers as you progressed because agony was such a tedious task to build up and you had to grind lower tiers multiple days at least and, in the process, learn and re-learn the fractal mechanics. You had to get better at them through repetition. Now anyone who farms Istan or other gold farms in open world PVE has a free pass to Tier 4 fractals.

There have been multiple threads about fractal veterans moving unto CMs + T4s groups and also player-based gating like unstable cosmic essence kill-proof, which unfortunately can be faked as well, but that is not the focal point of this thread.

• The focal point is people who don't learn mechanics, don't understand stacking for mechanics/boonshare, and most importantly don't read party chat, are making it into Tier 4 Fractals.

A year on into Shattered Observatory and Twilight Oasis and T4 LFG is still rife with '@ Arkk' and '@ Amala' on those select days when they are dailies.

I have joined regular T4 parties that had people who were on 'dps' classes who had over 200 AR without any form of fractal attunement title (Savant/God) and they also consumed anguished tears of Alba. Which means they had 185 AR on a class and still used a +15 agony resist potion.I know AR converts to precision using offensive potion, toughness using defensive potion and concentration using mobility potion but having over 200 AR without the aid of any fractal attunement suggests to me they are overloading on agony resist and have no idea what they are doing.

I enjoy pugging regular T4 fractals for the most part, because there are still enough competent players in there that don't exclusively do CMs & T4s.But meeting 1 or 2 of these really bad groups is enough to ruin an evening of gaming, primarily because said evening is stuck in T4 fractals.

The unstable cosmic essence kill-proof requirement separates the uber from the regulars in T4, but what is there to separate the regulars from the bads?

Additional Edit: The above come off as a one-sided rant (which it certainly fulfills the requirements for!), but on the flip side if you don't gate the content that people are unable to handle they will continue failing at it.I am looking at this issue both ways: I cannot imagine it being fun for them to spend hours upon hours on a single simple T4 fractal boss, especially since they could better acclimatize at lower tiers but are unwilling to due to reward/time invested for T4 supercedes T3 and the lower tiers facilitated by ease of access. Which ironically is defeated by the fact that they are wasting time wiping on a boss they are not prepared for. And the ones able to do the content but choose to pug due to personal reasons risk getting a similarly bad experience when they run into them.

friends list and keeping the good there so you can group with them again, you know try to be social and build up a group of ingame friends.

Hard gates and attunement type lockouts were never a good design, so i'd say that the current gate is not only enough, but it might even be too much. Let's be honest, with your attitude you would be filtering players anyway.

@Astralporing.1957 said:Hard gates and attunement type lockouts were never a good design, so i'd say that the current gate is not only enough, but it might even be too much. Let's be honest, with your attitude you would be filtering players anyway.

Thanks for feedback on topic. Feedback regarding my attitude unnecessary though, it has no relevance to my query. Last thing I want is this thread devolving into something elitist vs casuals.

@Linken.6345 said:friends list and keeping the good there so you can group with them again, you know try to be social and build up a group of ingame friends.I do CM & T4s with my guild and buddy list regularly but I do pug T4s simply because it feels too well-oiled when you play in a static all the time.But I draw the line when it becomes clear a group is not capable of clearing higher tiered content due to repeated mechanics failure.

I agree that the current gating is of limited value. The thing is: there's no reliable way to gate that can't be cheezed, faked, or doesn't become overly annoying to veterans (with and without alt accounts). That's largely why ANet hasn't responded to any of the calls to show so-called "kill proof" in game — it's not really 'proof'; it's just better (for some folks) than nothing.

If you want to 'gate' people by skill, talk to them. Ask them how they avoid Arkk's bouncing Orbs or for how they reliably cap rings in Nightmare.

In my static, we usually just ask for foods & pots and that surprisingly results in few people without "sufficient" DPS and/or horrid footwork. Usually I'll ask for a joke (doesn't have to be a good one). That doesn't tell us anything about their abilities, but tells us if they are paying attention & can communicate (which helps if we run into trouble, plus sometimes it's good for a good set of laughs for the hour+ we're together).

tl;dr the current gating isn't great; it's just less worse than most alternatives

I pug T4s + Recs very often nowadays and trust me newer players that try T4 without having practiced in others tiers are not the main issue of bad groups. I met and still meet enough longterm fractal players - Savants and Prodigys - from time to time (I won't call them veterans) that are worse than decent although they must have played/farmed fractals a lot.I'm not talking about skipping strats or tricky stuff (I'll do them myself to have it easier for my groups) but a lot of T4 players just lack knowledge of mechanics and boss fights or to handle things when it gets a little bit spicy. There are a lot of groups out there who just throw stuff at bosses and try over and over again or fight for like 10 minutes on encounters calling out "it's all good". I leave such groups because it's just a waste of time. Although it's a game I want to have fun and their play style isn't what I expect. I don't need the meta composition but a team with profound knowledge of every fractal and their classes. Even today we ran T4s with 2 chronos, 1 scourge, 1 daredevil + druid. We were surprisingly fast but only because every player in this group knew what to do.Pugging T4 is lottery btw. and has nothing to do with beginners or longterm players in the first place.

I support @Vinceman.4572's comments ... except, of course it's more likely to find more skilled fractalers among the long-term players with titles. It's just not close to a guarantee. Our static has seen power chronos doing less damage than the support chrono, as well as new players running ridiculously off-meta builds that have been great contributors. We evaluate based on performance, not on KP or titles or AP or the age of the account.

@Vinceman.4572 -Your point about bad savant/prodigy was something I have encountered before, albeit not recently. I had forgotten that until you brought it up. Fair point.While I agree that T4s is a pug roulette, it does feel like there is a perceived increased chance of losing the bet these days and I am wondering why.

Before the introduction of Twilight Oasis and Shattered Observatory, or maybe even the mess that is instabilities right now, it felt like groups could be mashed up into all forms (5 dps players) and still clear T4 content in a pug comfortably. But these days, for very specific fractals it seems to be the general trend to have to rely on healers primarily because of multi-hits and never-ending condition application(toxic trail/afflicted).Is it an issue with the design of T4 fractals becoming more unmanageable then, rather than players not having enough practice with fractal mechanics?

@Illconceived Was Na.9781 -I have read your opinion of the current gate and am inclined to agree.I won't go into personal DPS since it would derail the point I want to make about party and basic encounter mechanics in Fractals but your encounters are similar to mine. I don't start my own groups when I pug regular T4s but rather join on groups with people already inside and don't specifically look for groups that require exactly 'chrono druid etc' either, so there is no gating from me while in-game anyway.

If memory serves me right Tier 4 fractals were advertised to be 'end game' and I would expect some semblance of awareness regarding party boonshare and stacking.As some other thread has stated they might see themselves as 'players with unique play styles' but I will never forget the staff elementalist who made a wide berth to consciously avoid the chrono's Timewarp while auto attacking from range in regular 99 nightmare earlier this year and had enolyss constantly teleporting to him.

@"OpiumRagDoll.1086" said:I will never forget the staff elementalist who made a wide berth to consciously avoid the chrono's Timewarp while auto attacking from range in regular 99 nightmare earlier this year and had enolyss constantly teleporting to him.Sigh. Yeah.Sometimes I read stories like this and I wonder if there's a lot of people doing that... or if a lot of people are seeing the same player.

People actually do low tier fractals??? I started with T4 (well I did 1 low lvl one once to see what the general concept was), I thought t1-3 were just for people who can't afford agony and /or ascended gear. I didn't even knew there was a gate to begin with...

The main issue with adapting the current system is that it would be unfair to newer players if more restrictions were put in place. The main question would be, is a short term unfair solution worth the possible long term benefit it might yield (depending on implementation)?

Obviously there is players who are playing T4 and are below what one might consider required minimum skill (as in a full group of such players would not succeed at T4 fractals thus requiring other players take over more responsibility). I have to agree with Vinceman.4572 here too though, this is not necessarily a new player issue. As with most things, unless forced (either via design restrictions, personal ambition, difficulty, etc.) some players will do the bare minimum required, why:"because it has worked for them in the past."

I would actually love something similar to what WoW did with their personal training instances where you had to qualify for a specific role and reach silver or gold rank to be allowed to perform this role in certain challenging dungeon content. This of course wouldn't fit into the current minimal GW2 trinity (which only works in fractals and raids) but it did force players to actually deal with their class, role and player skill or be locked out of the content.

Again the main disparity here is between the very very very low skill ceiling and requirements of 90% of the game (and lack of mechanical explanation) and the remaining maybe 10% of challenging content. It's like playing 2 different MMOs in one game.

Unfortunately I don't think changing the remaining 90% of the game into being more challenging would work either (and I would not be in favor of that simply because there is a ton of people who simply want to unwind a little in brainless open world content, I do too occasionally). Maybe some middle ground can be found in form of achievements or recurring personal challenges (think Queens Gauntlet) which would allow players willing and able to improve, practice and show their over comming of such challenges to both prepare them for challenging content as well as make grouping easier.

@"OpiumRagDoll.1086" said:@Vinceman.4572 -Your point about bad savant/prodigy was something I have encountered before, albeit not recently. I had forgotten that until you brought it up. Fair point.While I agree that T4s is a pug roulette, it does feel like there is a perceived increased chance of losing the bet these days and I am wondering why.

Before the introduction of Twilight Oasis and Shattered Observatory, or maybe even the mess that is instabilities right now, it felt like groups could be mashed up into all forms (5 dps players) and still clear T4 content in a pug comfortably. But these days, for very specific fractals it seems to be the general trend to have to rely on healers primarily because of multi-hits and never-ending condition application(toxic trail/afflicted).Is it an issue with the design of T4 fractals becoming more unmanageable then, rather than players not having enough practice with fractal mechanics?It's both. On one side the fractals have become more difficult on average than before. On another, due to that a lot more people are running now meta comps... and thus have no idea what to do if they happen to end up in a different party setting. Before, everyone needed to pay attention. Nowadays, dps players are way too used to healers keeping them alive. Put many of them in a team with bad healer (or no healer), and they suddenly have no idea how to survive.

@Illconceived Was Na.9781 -I have read your opinion of the current gate and am inclined to agree.I won't go into personal DPS since it would derail the point I want to make about party and basic encounter mechanics in Fractals but your encounters are similar to mine. I don't start my own groups when I pug regular T4s but rather join on groups with people already inside and don't specifically look for groups that require exactly 'chrono druid etc' either, so there is no gating from me while in-game anyway.

If memory serves me right Tier 4 fractals were advertised to be 'end game' and I would expect some semblance of awareness regarding party boonshare and stacking.As some other thread has stated they might see themselves as 'players with unique play styles' but I will never forget the staff elementalist who made a wide berth to consciously avoid the chrono's Timewarp while auto attacking from range in regular 99 nightmare earlier this year and had enolyss constantly teleporting to him.

I have seen dps slots doing lower dps than warrior, chrono and druid. I usually get surprised at this point, but then i remember that at some time i was doing similarily low dps as well.

Having read all these feedback:

1. (Hard gates and lock outs never a good idea).
2. (Issue is not about being new but rather about player skill, no matter how long they have been loitering in Tier 4).
3. (No easy solution to this problem).
4. Simple game play reinforced by lack of pressure in open world content + hard-carrying done by their group does not motivate certain players to improve.
5. Along with my starting point of how easy it is to get into Tier 4 Fractals.

• Locking Tiers behind agony-resist as it feels like a dated concept extending back to the roots of Fractal 2013

Players who understand mechanics may be locked out by the agony requirement while players who major in other PVE content where you just press-1-to-win, but come to Tier 4 for 'easy gold' (no thanks to all the gold-making guides trumpeting how much gold you get compared to other sources) are granted access.

• The agony-resist check does protect the completely new players from content they are unable to handle skill-wise but there is also a flip-side

I understand the agony requirement will at least lock out the completely new players (who are new to the game and therefore too poor to buy ascended gear) so they don't wander into high-tiers and make life hell for everyone including themselves. It may be a surprising majority of players but at the same time I have read comments about people being worried about trying to start even Tier 1 fractals because they heard about this beast called Agony.

All I am seeing is the agony resist gate filtering out new players and skilled players from content while allowing in others who are on-paper able to do the content but in-practice terrible at it.

I won't be as audacious as to ask for a full revamp of the system not with how deeply ingrained agony resist is on the economy now, but I do hope for plausible suggestions (design-wise) for making fractals less hell for anyone who pugs and also for those who genuinely want to progress up higher tiers.

Additional edit:

• Maybe uncouple ascended gear from agony-resist or do away with the agony-resist gate for Tiers.

My personal opinion is that ascended gear should never have been part of a gate to accessing high tier fractals, because of how terrible the drops (rings, accessories) from daily T1/T2 boxes. It takes a regular player who does not farm gold / convert gems to gold / easy other sources of gold quite a while to accumulate enough AR for T3. It just feels cumbersome to gate content behind, for lack of a better term, pay-to-win, even if it's just in-game currency.

At this stage in the game's life where veterans from WvW, raids and fractals are probably swimming in ascended gear and the only vertical progression left is +5 stats infusions, wouldn't it be better to just make it such that ascended gear just exist to slot these +5 stats infusions in rather than use it as a gate for tiered content?

We can already buy +5 stats infusions with regular infusions, so there will probably still be a market for agony resist, granted people are crazy enough to want to gear all their 72 alt characters in +5 stats infusions. Or perhaps make account agony purchasable outside of fractal attunements after removing this 150AR agony gate.. They would have no impact on gating but rather would just enhance the Omnipotion effects like they are doing now (and of course implement a upper limit on account AR where the fractal attunement AR is added independently of the cap, like how account magic find is added after luck is maxed-out).

Yes, i believe most of us agree that thecurrent implementation of agony is very outdated (some of us may even agree that the very concept of agony was flawed from the very beginning, although that is probably not as big a groupas in the first case). Even devs agree with it - they just can't change it without upsetting the whole economy that arose around infusions and ascended gear, and they do not think the issue is major enough to warrant risking major changes that might make some people very unhappy.

Personally i do not agree, but i do understand where they come from, and the issue is not big enough for me to make a fuss out of it.

So, basically, we may see some agony changes if there ever will be some major rework of fractal mechanics, but almost certainly not without such a rework. And perhaps not even with one.

@Astralporing.1957 said:Yes, i believe most of us agree that thecurrent implementation of agony is very outdated (some of us may even agree that the very concept of agony was flawed from the very beginning, although that is probably not as big a groupas in the first case). Even devs agree with it - they just can't change it without upsetting the whole economy that arose around infusions and ascended gear, and they do not think the issue is major enough to warrant risking major changes that might make some people very unhappy.

Personally i do not agree, but i do understand where they come from, and the issue is not big enough for me to make a fuss out of it.

So, basically, we may see some agony changes if there ever will be some major rework of fractal mechanics, but almost certainly not without such a rework. And perhaps not even with one.

I think that's a fair assessment: everyone agrees it could be better (some are more vocal/vehement about it) and none of us have a solution good enough to make it worth the dev time plus market disruption plus general disruption. I think it's worth discussing, because maybe someone will figure out something... but probably not.

Instead of complaining about gate, why not complain about the design in the first place?

It is much harder for newbies to find people to do fotm with compare to the vets. There just isn't a lot of newbies out there, especially off hours. Naturally, since they can't find fellow newbies to do fotm with, they will just hop to the higher level ones.

This is a expected outcome when you push the fotm to 100 levels from 50 levels. Do people actually expect the game to enough people over years to sustain this kind of design?

wait what, reaching 150 AR is cheap?

its about 250ish gold for the agony infusions.And you need full ascended which is costy for new players.You also need to get/make some infused accessories to be able to squeese in those extra agony resistances.

IDK bout cheap, but i dont think "completely new or bad" players can just ramp up ~ 500 gold however they please and do timegated stuff for making the armor without getting relatively good experience in the process.

If they do swipe to win, it wont take long until they start to either gain experience the hard way or maybe stepps down and start playing for their proper fraclevel.

@Noha.3749 said:wait what, reaching 150 AR is cheap?

its about 250ish gold for the agony infusions.

It's 125g tbh. 1 +9 is about 7g and you need 17 of them to have 153 AR (and that's +3 overcapped).

Since fractals are meant to progress, there's no need to rush asc armor + agony resistance and on your journey to T4 you'll already make a lot of gold + mats to buy and craft the missing stuff and especially crafting your infusions since you'll get a lot of +1 during the ascension. Maybe it's not cheap to instagear and -buy everything but that's not how the system was meant to be designed, not in the past and not today. Players who cannnot be patient will be the ones leaving fractals (and most likely the game) because they rush the content and have nothing to go for in the future weeks/months.

@"OpiumRagDoll.1086" said:

@Linken.6345 said:friends list and keeping the good there so you can group with them again, you know try to be social and build up a group of ingame friends.I do CM & T4s with my guild and buddy list regularly but I do pug T4s simply because it feels too well-oiled when you play in a static all the time.But I draw the line when it becomes clear a group is not capable of clearing higher tiered content due to repeated mechanics failure.

Your original post asks, what separates the regulars from the bads, and Linken has given you the answer. You do. You don't need Anet to hold your hand and keep all the bad players out of your party, just do it yourself. No stupid resource grind, everyone can adapt it to their own preferences, no pinging. I really doubt you can find a better solution.

Success in gw2 fractals is 1/5 personal performance and 4/5's networking.

@thrag.9740When I started the thread, my main objective was to find out what other players thought about the restrictions due to game design, hence the title 'developer-designed gate'I have gotten some feedback from this thread that have broadened by own insight into the matter and am sincerely grateful to those who have contributed thus far.But your reply and Linkin's reply are just sidestepping what I was asking about. If you want to contribute, don't be lazy and insert comments that have no relevance while quoting me.I know the (edit: social) options to getting good players. I do have multiple raid statics after all and, among them, enough competent players who can do T4 without problems whatsoever. But this is about pugging, not about playing with people I know. Is this not why the LFG tab exists?CM+T4 groups are the result of a community-based distinction, it is neither endorsed nor condemned by Anet itself. But the access to Tier 4 itself is by default a game-design issue.

@SkyShroud.2865You are right, it is an old game and people who actually want to do Fractals are all clustered in the high tiers, with the root cause being shortage of new blood. This could possibly be the cause of why new players were cheesing into T4s to find people to play with and I have nothing to refute that.The game design for group-instanced content (happens to every aging MMO game) will cause problems at some point since they don't adapt to lower player populations.I would have held some expectation for the player population to be more evenly spread out even after these years if the development had continued at the cadence when Fractals first came out but...Fractals at one point did seem to be a development focus but Guild Wars 2 now seem to have rediscovered its roots and gone full throttle on open world focus instead.

@"OpiumRagDoll.1086" said:You are right, it is an old game and people who actually want to do Fractals are all clustered in the high tiers, with the root cause being shortage of new blood. This could possibly be the cause of why new players were cheesing into T4s to find people to play with and I have nothing to refute that.Also the way fractal rewards work is heavily biased against new players. New people aren't going to grind up to t4 the hard way, because the rewards on the way are awful, they're going to buy a bunch of AR and jump straight to t4 where the actual rewards are, or they're going to just go farm Istan or something instead.

Also agony should be given the same treatment as Magic Find and become an account-wide stat, but that's neither here nor there.

The "gate" is inefficient because it's not a gate at all -- it can be bypassed by playing with a group. Grinding through T1-T3 forces you to learn through sheer repetition. By the time you get to T4, you will be a much better teammate than someone who's dead body was carried through T4 by guildies.

@"OpiumRagDoll.1086" said:@"thrag.9740"But your reply and Linkin's reply are just sidestepping what I was asking about. If you want to contribute, don't be lazy and insert comments that have no relevance while quoting me.

Your thread title: "Is the current developer-designed gate to pugging Tier 4 Fractals good enough?"

Answer: yes because developer-designed gating is unnecessary when player designed gating is more adaptive and effective. I fail to see the lack of relevance. I guess anyone who has an opinion you don't like is "not relevant"

@"thrag.9740"Answer: yes because developer-designed gating is unnecessary

You answered to the point there. It is just your personal opinion that I dismiss feedback as irrelevant because I don't like it.The reason I dismissed your previous post was because you never directly addressed what I was asking (The title itself says pugging), and chose to focus on a single line in the body of text with a solution repeated Ad nauseam lifted off other threads ("Play with people you know", you know, the generic answer in just about every raiding is too hard to get into thread)For the record, I wholly agree with your opinion that playing with people you know is the best way to avoid 'bads'.