Seasonal instabilities.

Its concept that blizzard started playing with in bfa (the current expac) and i think it would fit well with gw2. M+ and fractals share alot in common and their afflixions work pretty much like instbilities in gw2. Recently blizzard started adding seasonal afflixions themed from the raid of each season there. Raids in gw2 dont come nearly as often so i suggest instead of introducing 1 or 2 new seasonal instabilities with each raid instead tie them to living world or festivals.

This wont be a continuous addition of instabilities leading to instability bloat but rather on a set interval (placed by anet) there will be x new instabs themed around the event running at the time. Come the next event these instabilities will be replaced with new ones fitting thematically to the new event.

No, thank you.Although I appreciate the future changes to instabilities in fractals (They look better than the actual ones, also: Could it be worse than now, well yeah it could but I hope it won't) such a garbage system should never come to raids at all.Fractal instabilities don't add anything interesting to the game. They are not spicing things up or leading to adjustments/different decisionmaking, they just are an annoyance at best. There's always that one mate putting flux bomb into the middle of the encounter.Almost all of them are useless. Let's face it, as an experienced player you just watch out for 2 symbols: 1. "Social Awkwardness" because it's the real cancer of fractals and 2. is "No Pain, no gain" to remind your chrono and/or spb to remove boons if they aren't already after it. The latter one is also negligible outside of very ambitious groups because it can be ignored like the others, here resulting in a little bit of a slower run but nobody cares in such groups.They should give us "real" encounters in fractals and nothing else.

@"Vinceman.4572" said:No, thank you.Although I appreciate the future changes to instabilities in fractals (They look better than the actual ones, also: Could it be worse than now, well yeah it could but I hope it won't) such a garbage system should never come to raids at all.Fractal instabilities don't add anything interesting to the game. They are not spicing things up or leading to adjustments/different decisionmaking, they just are an annoyance at best. There's always that one mate putting flux bomb into the middle of the encounter.Almost all of them are useless. Let's face it, as an experienced player you just watch out for 2 symbols: 1. "Social Awkwardness" because it's the real cancer of fractals and 2. is "No Pain, no gain" to remind your chrono and/or spb to remove boons if they aren't already after it. The latter one is also negligible outside of very ambitious groups because it can be ignored like the others, here resulting in a little bit of a slower run but nobody cares in such groups.They should give us "real" encounters in fractals and nothing else.

I wasnt advocating for instabilities to come to raids.

Doesn't matter. The oncoming changes paint a clear picture: It took aeons for them to change things here so it's kinda obvious they'll never have the resources to change instabilities over the year. And I'm fine with that since they are useless anyways.

@Vinceman.4572 said:Doesn't matter. The oncoming changes paint a clear picture: It took aeons for them to change things here so it's kinda obvious they'll never have the resources to change instabilities over the year. And I'm fine with that since they are useless anyways.

Instabilities can be quire easier to develope than fractals and could result in the experience feeling unique enough to justify it. The system simply hasnt had the attention it needs to work.

Also it seems theis is rather a sizeable change to most insabilities on top of new ones. Im merely asking for like a 1/10 of this.

You were here when Anet Ben told us to change Social Awkwardness "soon", right? If not, I'll remind you: It was months ago, if not half a year. That's why I doubt that they are able to even ship out a single seasonal instability every couple of months. Like they aren't able to ship out raids and fractals more often.Furthermore, most of the players don't like them at all and/or do not care about them. Where is the additional value that makes the fractal experience more amazing if even the actual and the new ones of January aren't triggering the players in a very positive way.

I like how the new instabilities seem more impactful. That's my main complaint with the current system, they don't matter. And the t4 are considered easy so noone wan't to bother anyway.

I still think instabilities should be like in games like Bastion, you toggle them and they give you better rewards but make stuff really harder. You should be able to toggle 10 of them for great rewards and also great difficulty. That would also lead to a lot of possible challenges, tailored to what you think is fun to play. Like the festival of the 4 winds arena where you add up stiff.

@"Vinceman.4572" said:You were here when Anet Ben told us to change Social Awkwardness "soon", right? If not, I'll remind you: It was months ago, if not half a year. That's why I doubt that they are able to even ship out a single seasonal instability every couple of months. Like they aren't able to ship out raids and fractals more often.Furthermore, most of the players don't like them at all and/or do not care about them. Where is the additional value that makes the fractal experience more amazing if even the actual and the new ones of January aren't triggering the players in a very positive way.

He said they had planned to make changes to instabilities and ship them with the next fractal release which is this one (was stated iirc after or right before ep3)

@zealex.9410 said:

@"Vinceman.4572" said:You were here when Anet Ben told us to change Social Awkwardness "soon", right? If not, I'll remind you: It was months ago, if not half a year. That's why I doubt that they are able to even ship out a single seasonal instability every couple of months. Like they aren't able to ship out raids and fractals more often.Furthermore, most of the players don't like them at all and/or do not care about them. Where is the additional value that makes the fractal experience more amazing if even the actual and the new ones of January aren't triggering the players in a very positive way.

Nothing you wrote is obliterating my statement. Things still take too long to get into the game being it changes or new content. My point stands we won't see such varying instas. You should better believe in Santa.

@Vinceman.4572 said:

@zealex.9410 said:

@Vinceman.4572 said:You were here when Anet Ben told us to change Social Awkwardness "soon", right? If not, I'll remind you: It was months ago, if not half a year. That's why I doubt that they are able to even ship out a single seasonal instability every couple of months. Like they aren't able to ship out raids and fractals more often.Furthermore, most of the players don't like them at all and/or do not care about them. Where is the additional value that makes the fractal experience more amazing if even the actual and the new ones of January aren't triggering the players in a very positive way.

They could have the changes done for months now and simply had them slotted for this release. Same thing applies to fractal idk why it wouldnt apply to this.

With a lot of caveats, yeah, I think this could be really fun.

My understanding of Ben's comments is that adjusting instabilities is relatively straightforward, adding new ones isn't too bad (if they don't need new tech), and that the harder thing has already been done: setting things up so that they can be whitelisted/blacklisted/randomized etc.

If that's true, then @"zealex.9410"'s idea would have two components:

• Adding new instabs that are seasonally appropriate.
• Manually updating the whitelist/random sort (or making it automatic).

Neither of those seem difficult if my paraphrasing comes close to Ben's reality.

That leaves the question of: would seasonal instabs be good for the game?To answer that, I need to make another assumption, which is that Ben & friends end up creating a really good set of "fun" instabilities. Right now, we have three kinds: barely noticeable, tolerable, and intolerable (the ones that cause people to skip nights). There's some consensus on which instabs fit which of those categories (e.g. some people skip if it's social awkwardness, some don't mind; some don't notice vindicators and some can't stand them). What we haven't really seen is instabilities that people like.

If they can pull that off, then I'd love to see the list vary throughout the year, and if they can make it seasonally appropriate too, that seems even more fun. (Although I'd prefer to see it match festivals and Living World rather than Winter|Spring|Summer|Fall.)

@Illconceived Was Na.9781 said:With a lot of caveats, yeah, I think this could be really fun.

---

My understanding of Ben's comments is that adjusting instabilities is relatively straightforward, adding new ones isn't too bad (if they don't need new tech), and that the harder thing has already been done: setting things up so that they can be whitelisted/blacklisted/randomized etc.

If that's true, then @"zealex.9410"'s idea would have two components:

• Adding new instabs that are seasonally appropriate.
• Manually updating the whitelist/random sort (or making it automatic).

Neither of those seem difficult if my paraphrasing comes close to Ben's reality.

That leaves the question of: would seasonal instabs be good for the game?To answer that, I need to make another assumption, which is that Ben & friends end up creating a really good set of "fun" instabilities. Right now, we have three kinds: barely noticeable, tolerable, and intolerable (the ones that cause people to skip nights). There's some consensus on which instabs fit which of those categories (e.g. some people skip if it's social awkwardness, some don't mind; some don't notice vindicators and some can't stand them). What we haven't really seen is instabilities that people like.

If they can pull that off, then I'd love to see the list vary throughout the year, and if they can make it seasonally appropriate too, that seems even more fun. (Although I'd prefer to see it match festivals and Living World rather than Winter|Spring|Summer|Fall.)

My idea was for it to match festivals (yes, sab themed instabilities ^^) seasons are kinda bland and lw is kinda weird as in theres not really clear theme for each one episode.