Timegating a Fractal. Really?

So I agree that the farm method posted on reddit which people farm the last boss of fractal 61 in about 10 seconds and make +100 gold per hour is broken, but.

I have been farming this fractal with my guild for a long time with the usual way (doing every event and the boss from start to finish over and over again). 1 completion would take about 2 mins and yield around 25-30g per hour and a bit more if you have augmentations. This farm requires good team coordination, great knowledge of underwater skills, rotations and putting high effort all the time to be able to complete it as fast as possible and make it efficient.

So you are saying to me that, tryharding underwater rotations, coordinating constantly and putting high effort into a content to make gold is not OK. But, going to SW or any world boss/meta event and pressing just 1-1-1 is completely fine and the right thing to do?! I dont even know if there is a content now that is rewarding for the effort you put in...

A better nerf would be: “Players cannot collect final boss rewards in fractal 61 if they have not participated in the previous events”But instead you are timegating a fractal because of your own faulty design.

I hope you can find a better way to solve the “abusive farm”.

Are you talking about the 5-minute cooldown? Five minutes??

@Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:Are you talking about the 5-minute cooldown? Five minutes??

Yes

Why don't people get the fact a fractal is not meant to be FARMED. To do as a daily? Sure. For a collection? Sure.

But literally people act so surprised when these fractal farms at nerfed, when their whole design is to NOT farm. I'm not telling you to play a certain way, or do it my way, but come on people, you should have seen this a mile away.

Nice change. It took way too long till the nerf but finally it's there. Ty Anet.

How many people do you think farm Aquatic? How much time do you think ANet should invest into plugging an obvious exploit? How much do you think they should worry about the handful of others who will be impacted by a 5 minute cooldown?

This is one of those "why we can't have nice things" situations: someone abused a loophole and ANet found a quick way to close it, which of course had foreseen consequences to legit players. It's annoying and unfortunate. And it's also more efficient than trying to find a perfect solution and letting the exploit go unchallenged.

I'm genuinely sorry that your group's activity has been slowed down by this change targeted at someone else. I suspect that if you made a case for it, you might be able to convince ANet to change their mind.

go do your dailies and STACK on the world boss auto attacking it to death and don't forget to buy more gems to buy that epic skin.

Anet wants you to farm on open world, not on instanced content. If this farm caught on before it was stopped, open-world would look barren because everyone would be in their own instanced fractals.

This should be done for all fractals anyway. There are still other fractals you can constantly spam, making 60g+/h.

Fractals are/were rebalanced a while back to have a certain minimum and maximum clear time. The rewards for completing the fractal are based around these values.

Players finding exploits, certain unintended mechanics or skipping content leads to issues in reward balance.

Arenanet now has multiple ways to adress this issue:1.) fix the skips, exploits, unintended interactions etc. on a case to case basis2.) extend the length of fractals which are to short3.) ban players who exploited, skipped, used unintended game mechanics4.) introduce flat reward timegates5.) remove the game content6.) reduce the rewards provided for the content7.) ignore the issue

Now you tell me which of those options you would prefer besides number 7 to be used in this type of situation but keep in mind, some take quite a lot of developer work. I can live with pretty much all of them though I would prefer to not see players get banned for using unintended game mechanics (which has happened in the past mind you, remember Karma weapons, or the Wintersday Amulett, etc.?).

The 5 minute cool down was added to prevent exploits and not have to temoprarly remove active players from the game (though that might still happen). Yes, it has an unfortunate side effect of making the fractal less farmable.

@Glider.5792 said:This should be done for all fractals anyway. There are still other fractals you can constantly spam, making 60g+/h.

Agreed, not sure why the timer wasn't added accross all fractals. It would not affect normal clear rates and would only affect sub 5 minute consecutive runs.

I guess it's a "quick fix" because sorting this thing out properly takes much more effort. The root cause might be the incredible power creep. The fractal team is not in charge of tweaking the power of classes, so they try to adjust the fractals instead. They thought adding stupid new instabilities and stacking them would help fighting the power creep, but it turns out that doesn't work. It only made some players step away from fractals. The meta groups simply ignore the instabs and most of the mechanics. I was one of those who stepped away from Fractals when they made the big changes to instabs. I played a few fractals recently and was surprised how easy and fast they were done, despite all the instabs. Meta groups have so many perma-boons and dps now, they usually just stand on the same spot, ignoring mechanics and instabs. I quickly realized that my way of doing fractals was outdated. I remember failing at Mai Trin in the past, or not having enough dps to take down Subject 6 before the golden oozes pop up. That's all history now, thanks to the power creep and the fact that mostly meta people keep doing fractals more for rewards than for fun.

I see that the fractal team has no influence on the power creep, and it's hard to adjust your content that way. The instabs were a bad idea though, they annoyed players like me who simply stopped doing fractals (which was my favourite content before) and made other players using all means to shorten the time for completion. And now, seeing that their instabs didn't make the content harder, they try to add other measures, like time gates. Still better than adding a non-skippable cut-scene before the end "boss".

In a perfect world, they would make the actual fractals harder, or more demanding, or enforcing mechanics. Or simply make the boss fight of Aquatic Ruins feel like a boss fight. The same goes for other boss fights that feel like doing the Fire Elemental or the Great Jungle Wurm world bosses. I get the feeling that the raid team is in a similar uneasy position, the new raid seems to be too easy (haven't tried it myself, that was the feedback of players I know).

More internal communication between teams within Anet might help.

People are just stupid to share good methods to farm gold in this game. If you have one, keep it to yourself or reliable friends.

@"Cyninja.2954" said:Fractals are/were rebalanced a while back to have a certain minimum and maximum clear time. The rewards for completing the fractal are based around these values.

Players finding exploits, certain unintended mechanics or skipping content leads to issues in reward balance.

Arenanet now has multiple ways to adress this issue:1.) fix the skips, exploits, unintended interactions etc. on a case to case basis2.) extend the length of fractals which are to short3.) ban players who exploited, skipped, used unintended game mechanics4.) introduce flat reward timegates5.) remove the game content6.) reduce the rewards provided for the content7.) ignore the issue

Now you tell me which of those options you would prefer besides number 7

I don't think it's fair to call this an exploit. The fractal was being fully cleared in the farm. It's not like players were glitching through walls or anything (at least not from what I read). Additionally players getting credit for joining at the end of a fractal was intentionally adding into the game by Anet. There was a time where if you DC'd from a fractal, you just couldn't get back into it (i.e. no late joins:https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/13bl93/fractals_no_way_to_rejoin_after_disconnect/). Late joins were specifically added in by Anet. Nothing here was performing in a way that Anet had not specifically designed.

The problem lies in the fact that it shouldn't be possible to solo a fractal at a speed comparable to a full 5 man group. In short, a fractal that requires no team work is simply a poorly designed fractal. I think it is possible to make soloing much more challenging without changing the length of the fractal much. I don't see an easy way to fix how easy it is to solo the dolphin path/dark path runs. But I believe if you simply replaced the last set of trash mobs with a single powerful champion, you could make it much more difficult to solo without adding much time to the clear time of a full 5 man group.

@Compleo.3182 said:People are just stupid to share good methods to farm gold in this game. If you have one, keep it to yourself or reliable friends.

That would demand to always have a static group, the moment there isn't a full party and lfg is used, it's almost guaranteed it won't be secret anymore.

@thrag.9740 said:The problem lies in the fact that it shouldn't be possible to solo a fractal at a speed comparable to a full 5 man group. In short, a fractal that requires no team work is simply a poorly designed fractal. I think it is possible to make soloing much more challenging without changing the length of the fractal much. I don't see an easy way to fix how easy it is to solo the dolphin path/dark path runs. But I believe if you simply replaced the last set of trash mobs with a single powerful champion, you could make it much more difficult to solo without adding much time to the clear time of a full 5 man group.

I don't think ANET has an issue with players soloing fractals, or even soloing them quickly. This farm allowed players to get fractal encryptions far faster than they want.

You'll note they didn't completely prevent this farm from happening...just by adding a 5 min cooldown they make it less efficient.

This is the reality of MMOs: players will always push the limits beyond what developers can foresee and test.

Anyone who knew about this farm and is surprised at this move was just living in denial. Sure we can scream about the 'fun police', but we play in THEIR world, so we have to abide by THEIR rules. The only power you have here is, if you don't like it, you can choose to leave the game.

@thrag.9740 said:

@"Cyninja.2954" said:Fractals are/were rebalanced a while back to have a certain minimum and maximum clear time. The rewards for completing the fractal are based around these values.

Players finding exploits, certain unintended mechanics or skipping content leads to issues in reward balance.

Arenanet now has multiple ways to adress this issue:1.) fix the skips, exploits, unintended interactions etc. on a case to case basis2.) extend the length of fractals which are to short3.) ban players who exploited, skipped, used unintended game mechanics4.) introduce flat reward timegates5.) remove the game content6.) reduce the rewards provided for the content7.) ignore the issue

Now you tell me which of those options you would prefer besides number 7

Agreed, but I was referring to skips in general. Some of them can easily be classified as exploits even if the ones used for this specific fractal might be more mild.

The funny thing is, people enjoy the benefits of super lucrative farms but are unwilling to accept the effect these might have on the games economy if every one did them. It becomes a matter of: I want all the rewards but also the benefit from other people acquiring wealth way slower.

Believe it or not, there is an internal guideline for how lucrative a farm should and can be. It's quite far from 100 gold per hour. Now TC might dislike the fact that while his method of farming might have been within the games acceptable range (and 20-30 gold is pretty much where most lucrative farms are settled at), this change was aimed at the minority who made vastly more gold.

alot of classes can do skips.

the current meta without druid/chrono has the fb do the "jp" part in cliffside for example

raid portal, cast sword of justice above you, use merciful intervention on the sword of justice, activate raid portal. congratz you just took over the chrono's job

my opinion is: if you kill a thing in a legit way, then why nerf it?

either you scale up difficulty, scale down underwater abilities on some classes or a combination of both.affecting the entire playerbase, based on the actions of a handful is a waste of resources

5 minutes is not that long tho.

@TanksK.4795 said:5 minutes is not that long tho.

it is. 5 mins is 2 clears.

@melandru.3876 said:

@TanksK.4795 said:5 minutes is not that long tho.

Clearing Aquatic Ruins in 2 minutes is not intended. Arenanet now had a choice:

• reduce rewards per clear
• extend the length of the fractal
• add a completion timer

They went with option 3.

a thing i'd like to know tho (can't test it, i'm without pc this weekend)

is the cooldown on the fractal, or on the tier?if you clear 61, can you then do 76 or will 76 also have the cooldown?

if so, you could just rotate between 61 and 76 the difference is non near existant in clear-time. just more "luck" for an instab that might slow you down..a bit

@Cyninja.2954 said:

@melandru.3876 said:

@"TanksK.4795" said:5 minutes is not that long tho.

• reduce rewards per clear
• extend the length of the fractal
• add a completion timer

i'm not disagreeing with you, 2 min is very fast.

still stand by my point, that zero illegal things are, and were done. every thing got killed/completed in a legit way

the real "bad" thing, as clearly shown, is the powercreep that both pof and hot brought

underwater reaper, underwater chrono, underwater soulbeast, underwater firebrand..... the dps they can pull off is off the charts. not the players fault, "balance" fault

@Skotlex.7580 said:

@Compleo.3182 said:People are just stupid to share good methods to farm gold in this game. If you have one, keep it to yourself or reliable friends.

You wouldnt use lfg for a strat like that, because it requires coordination. And yes, eventually it will be used by more ppl, but posting it on reddit was just a stupid unless they hoped it to be nerfed.

@Alyster.9470 said:So I agree that the farm method posted on reddit which people farm the last boss of fractal 61 in about 10 seconds and make +100 gold per hour is broken, but.

I have been farming this fractal with my guild for a long time with the usual way (doing every event and the boss from start to finish over and over again). 1 completion would take about 2 mins and yield around 25-30g per hour and a bit more if you have augmentations. This farm requires good team coordination, great knowledge of underwater skills, rotations and putting high effort all the time to be able to complete it as fast as possible and make it efficient.

So you are saying to me that, tryharding underwater rotations, coordinating constantly and putting high effort into a content to make gold is not OK. But, going to SW or any world boss/meta event and pressing just 1-1-1 is completely fine and the right thing to do?! I dont even know if there is a content now that is rewarding for the effort you put in...

A better nerf would be: “Players cannot collect final boss rewards in fractal 61 if they have not participated in the previous events”But instead you are timegating a fractal because of your own faulty design.

I hope you can find a better way to solve the “abusive farm”.

Exactly this is what anet is saying. They said it before when they reworked f40. I would argue that underwater is nowhere near balanced so maybe they changed it because of this but i doubt it. They want this game to be for casuals so tryhard players should earn the same as casuals. Their logic.

@ButcherofMalakir.4067 said:

@Alyster.9470 said:So I agree that the farm method posted on reddit which people farm the last boss of fractal 61 in about 10 seconds and make +100 gold per hour is broken, but.

I have been farming this fractal with my guild for a long time with the usual way (doing every event and the boss from start to finish over and over again). 1 completion would take about 2 mins and yield around 25-30g per hour and a bit more if you have augmentations. This farm requires good team coordination, great knowledge of underwater skills, rotations and putting high effort all the time to be able to complete it as fast as possible and make it efficient.

So you are saying to me that, tryharding underwater rotations, coordinating constantly and putting high effort into a content to make gold is not OK. But, going to SW or any world boss/meta event and pressing just 1-1-1 is completely fine and the right thing to do?! I dont even know if there is a content now that is rewarding for the effort you put in...

A better nerf would be: “Players cannot collect final boss rewards in fractal 61 if they have not participated in the previous events”But instead you are timegating a fractal because of your own faulty design.

I hope you can find a better way to solve the “abusive farm”.

can't agree more

casual istan farmers complained that they can't do pala every 2 hours for the next 16 hours like jobless/on vacation farmerswho could have known that a guy working 1 hour, or a guy doing the same job, the same wage but 16 hours would not earn the same amount

what a mystery!

lets balance everything so that everyone is the same, what a game that would be. you play fir 30 minutes a day? no problem, that guy playing 18 hours won't go ahead of you