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The immense success of Fractals : Applied to the future of Raids


Zagerus.8675

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I may be hypothesizing but I'm willing to bet if we looked at metrics we would find that Fractals of the Mists are some of the most played content in GW2 to this day. They've been in the game since late 2012 and are still going strong. You can usually either find or create a group at all hours of the day. People like Fractals. I think this is because Fractals of the Mists have literally all of the hallmarks of exceptional group content and they do nearly everything right to cover all of the bases of what the community craves.

  1. Groups are 5 man - awesome, you don't have to sit around waiting forever to build a potent group. I think this is a huge reason as to why fractals have survived and stayed 110% out of life support territory (in addition to the rewards ofc.) Get two or three in the group and usually the rest fill pretty rapidly (even at off peak hours!!).
  2. The group play is intimate. With the meta shifting over to firebrand/alacrigade for most daily groups, we have a pristine window from which to view the majesty that is GW2's combat system. I've rarely had a bad time with a group with this kind of skill/profession interplay. It's amazing. Even in fractal groups where we whipe 2 or 3 times the energy of the group is focused on solving the task at hand rather than raging at each other.
  3. The difficulty is tiered. A new player can climb the mechanical skill ladder and have a fairly good experience while learning the mechanics of group play even alongside veteran players. Increasingly difficult Instabilities encourage players to be resourceful and adapt while trying to stay in rotation/fulfill the group role.
  4. The pacing of the fractals allows them to be picked up and sat down relatively easy. Again, having a 5 man cap for the group yields more time for random players to actually play the content alongside other random players. This also goes a long way in preventing the group from getting stagnant (and ragey) before they even start playing.tl;dr ease of access, path to mastery of content, low wait time before playing content, good rewards, excellent avenue for new players/veteran players to play alongside each other.

I believe all of these amazing traits can be seized upon and used to pave the way toward a new future for Raids. ArenaNet has always been a company that strives to pull players together and GW2 was born with the mindset of tearing down traditional pitfalls that prevent virtual communities from really coming together and sharing a bad kitten experience together. Iterate on what works and make it even more amazing. The hardcore GW2 community has long craved a challenge suited to their mechanical skill (based on feedback found in these forums,) and new players have yearned to just experience something epic and fun when they log in. So, is it possible to give both types of players exactly what they want while also pitting them against insurmountable difficulty in the exact same instance (just for fun?) .. Why not?

3-4 Lane 5-10 man group content leading to an epic climax: Raids would essentially end as 25-30 man encounters for the final boss, but would be accessible/able to complete via two 5 man groups from the start. Each lane would have it's own difficulty (Novice, Veteran, Champion, Legendary ect.) with respective rewards for successfully completing the instance. As an example, the novice lane could have waypoints placed throughout so if you die you can res up at the checkpoint and continue forward. Legendary lanes would be no-down, entire lane resets upon full wipe. HP values, trash mob mechanics ect. could be based relative to the difficulty so each lane would usually take the same amount of time. Maybe 10-12 mins max of hardcore play for the Legendary lane.

The Boss: The bosses would essentially have to be a suicide mission for the Legendary and Champion lane groups. 1 Hit KO's, unblockable 80% health sapping floor damage ticks that make healers cry, all that. The bosses would have a particularly deep-seated urge to annihilate these two groups as fast as possible, and both groups would absolutely need to coordinate on the fly/resort to muscle memory to complete mechanics. In contrast, the novice and veteran lane groups would play supporting roles around the final boss fight areas. Most of the mechanics would be easy for these groups to complete and would grant extremely helpful boons to the champ/legendary groups. These boons wouldn't be required to complete the encounters on Legendary difficulty, however, just nearly required. Should the Legendary and Champion groups succumb to failing their assigned mechanics, they would be sent to the beginning of their lane in a fresh instance with a few extra copper in their wallet while the novice/veteran groups close in to finish off whats left of a downscaled raid boss.

I really think that this kind of raid format would go a long way in catering to each niche of the GW2 community while also bringing them together to complete a common goal. Personally I would be sticking to the Novice lane for eternity. Just some random thoughts!

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@Vinceman.4572 said:The reason why fractals are played regularly is the rewards. It's around 20-30g in a single run under an hour and therefore beats most of other stuff in the game except boring farming. Gut the rewards and T4s + CMs will be a desert like Tier 1-3. That's what has happened to dungeons btw.

ThisPlus the rewards are obtainable daylie,Raids on the other hand weekly

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It's interesting to note that Vale Guardian has the same statistic as Fractal level 75 (73 is the exact value, at 30.5%), meaning less players proceeded to Fractal T4, than killed Vale Guardian. Also worth noting is that those beating Sabetha and reaching Fractal level 100 have the same number (20%).

Furthermore, while fractal yes were released in November of 2012, they never reached high levels of popularity until Heart of Thorns in October 2015 revamped them completely. This is evident by the lack of any content releases for Fractals for 2 whole years, from November 2013 (Fractured) up to the release of the expansion. And it wasn't until July 2016 that Fractals started getting new content again.

Finally everyone that played Fractals remembers the Swamps of the Mists. It wasn't that Fractals were popular as a concept or idea, but rather the rewards were better than anywhere else, as is evident by the amount of farming Swamp got, that got developer attention, and then all the other Farms, from level 40, to underwater and so on. Rewards, Dailies and (for a time, maybe not now) the Legendary Precursor collections added with Heart of Thorns are what is keeping Fractals alive.

Tiered difficulty or being 5-man group content means nothing

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@amidare.9561 said:I would say that in longterm, the only reason why fractals succeded is that you can earn that 20g +/- + some asc stuff. Doing same content daily for years is boring af.

long term repeatable pve content is obviously only successful because of the reward structures. The next factor is gameplay style, i.e min/max build/gear versus casual access.

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While I always enjoyed and played with the idea of splitting up a Raid group into two 5 player teams to eventually rejoin at the end, I don't think we will ever see anything to that extend of what you suggest in GW2, even if some of those ideas are pretty interesting.

What keeps content alive with engagement though is just the prospect of a future for that content, and what gets people interested in the first place is rewards.Fractals always felt like they were getting additions, so people kept being engaged with them, and the rewards kept bringing in new people.

If you contrast that with Raids, or even Fractals itself looking at CM's which themselves are on life support, it's always a question of will there be more and when?It's not just necessarily that there aren't many people playing CM's or Raids and therefor there isn't that much frequent or any content for them, it's because there isn't that much frequent or any content for them that not many people are playing it.

If GW2 had 4 PvE endgame teams and instead one LW team, not only would the Raid/Fractal player base dwarf any other content at this point, imo the game as a whole would have been much more popular at this point, but that's another topic.

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@Asum.4960 said:If GW2 had 4 PvE endgame teams and instead one LW team, not only would the Raid/Fractal player base dwarf any other content at this point, imo the game as a whole would have been much more popular at this point, but that's another topic.

Because the rest of the game would be an empty wasteland? Just accept it. The majority doesn't play instanced content. Not even in WoW. They don't even reach 90% raid participation with their easy mode LFR with auto grouping. The game would have died long ago without the LS teams.

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@Miellyn.6847 said:

@Asum.4960 said:If GW2 had 4 PvE endgame teams and instead one LW team, not only would the Raid/Fractal player base dwarf any other content at this point, imo the game as a whole would have been much more popular at this point, but that's another topic.

Because the rest of the game would be an empty wasteland? Just accept it. The majority doesn't play instanced content. Not even in WoW. They don't even reach 90% raid participation with their easy mode LFR with auto grouping. The game would have died long ago without the LS teams.

90% participation in endgame content is insane to expect, and more than double what endgame content needs to represent to keep an MMO healthy.

Also Living World (which btw, only has an engagement of about 30% of the playerbase at this point, which is on the level of Vale Guardian completion of Raids) turns itself into a wasteland with each new economy breaking farm map to desperately lure the player population into them.

Endgame content on the other hand doesn't cannibalize itself with new releases, with old Fractals and Raids not becoming dead, while new Fractals and Raids just enrich the roster of daily and weekly played content.That coupled with the players engaged with that content explicitly being there for the content and gameplay itself, not some farm where ever profitable and if it is Silverwastes for a decade, means frequent new content is much more important.How many times do open world players go back to all these maps for active play, in comparison to the daily encountered and enjoyed Fractals, and weekly Raids?

Additionally, casual players logging in weekly or even just quarterly for a few hours obviously have a much different content consumption than hardcore players being engaged for hours weekly, if not daily.

Having 4 content teams supporting extremely casual content to be enjoyed for a few hours before going back to the same old farm map and one team for all of hardcore content keeping people engaged for hundreds of hours each seems therefor rather backwards to me, and it's no surprise the game is leaking hardcore players at an alarming rate since ages.

We have been playing the same two and only Fractal CM's every day for over two years now, meanwhile how many maps that no ones cares about because they aren't a gamebreaking farm and kept people busy for just a few hours have been added? I can walk through some of these maps for 2 hours and maybe meet 3 players, outside of some loot showering Metas in some maps, of which there are more than enough (and which don't need new maps to be implemented and could easily be added by less teams into existing content).

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  • 2 weeks later...

Endgame content on the other hand doesn't cannibalize itself with new releases, with old Fractals and Raids not becoming dead, while new Fractals and Raids just enrich the roster of daily and weekly played content.

The community does a great job with the cannibalization :)Expect others to be perfects on the dps meters/charts , and later on whine at the company for not investing more money on hard istanced contents :)

(for some reason 8 months , feel like 1,5)

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@"Zagerus.8675" said:I may be hypothesizing but I'm willing to bet if we looked at metrics we would find that Fractals of the Mists are some of the most played content in GW2 to this day.

You might lose that bet. I am quite confident that Fractals, even at their height, were still significantly less popular than dungeons during their golden days. And now that popularity also went down by a lot, due to the average difficulty of fractals going up with reworks and adding new fractals that for the most part (with the sole exception of deepstone, maybe) are at well above average difficulty for this content.

  1. The group play is intimate. With the meta shifting over to firebrand/alacrigade for most daily groups, we have a pristine window from which to view the majesty that is GW2's combat system. I've rarely had a bad time with a group with this kind of skill/profession interplay. It's amazing. Even in fractal groups where we whipe 2 or 3 times the energy of the group is focused on solving the task at hand rather than raging at each other.Complexity of group play is one of the last things most players that were doing fractals at their height were interested in. And it's also one of the reasons why their population is now way down.

  2. The pacing of the fractals allows them to be picked up and sat down relatively easy.At lower tiers, yes. Get up to some of the fractals at t4, and it's no longer as true. Well, it may be true for most of the players that remained in fractals, but there's a reason for their popularity drop within last years.

tl;dr ease of access, path to mastery of content, low wait time before playing content, good rewards, excellent avenue for new players/veteran players to play alongside each other.First and third - true. those are very important. Second matters only for minority of players (and can even be a turnoff for many). And the fourth... getting new and veteran players together usually ends up being very painful for both of those groups. It's definitely not something i'd advocate.

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@Vinceman.4572 said:The reason why fractals are played regularly is the rewards. It's around 20-30g in a single run under an hour and therefore beats most of other stuff in the game except boring farming. Gut the rewards and T4s + CMs will be a desert like Tier 1-3. That's what has happened to dungeons btw.

Honestly I don't know about that man. I actually log in and run T4 fractals and occasionally CMs if I'm in the mood, just for something to do to get the PvE game crave out of the way. It has little to do with the gold/wealth gain, as I already have 9 characters outfitted in meta setups for all game modes, and I have plenty of liquid gold to work with already. Sure, getting rewards is nice. It helps me play fashion wars. But really, I run fractals because I still feel focused and alert when I run them, for all of the reasons that @"Zagerus.8675" mentioned. I still run fractals because it doesn't take an inordinate amount of time to organize, like raids do.

Going more into what Zag said, I've always felt like raids were more of an achievement thing for me, similar to the NPC 1v1s in the Crown Pavilion. Once I had completed a raid and associated achievements, I didn't want to ever touch them again. Did I feel this way because they were too difficult or the rewards weren't enough? No, not at all. It's that raids were a big ridiculous hassle to organize, to the point that it wasn't fun to do. I'd be spending just as much time organizing groups as I would be actually playing the content, regardless of if it was working with PUGs, or trying to form/join an elite group, create a schedule for everyone, and then try to make it work through the fire & the flame of people changing jobs, people getting girlfriends, people coming & going from school & internships, schedule changing in general, and of course players logging out and never signing in again. The raid content, given you can get together 10 even new players who want to learn who understand their class/role who have correct setups, given the amount of youtube videos they can watch, is not difficult content. If all 10 players stick together and were to play for oh say 12 hours straight or longer and get serious about watching videos and learn what they have to do, those 10 players could complete every raid in the game by the end of the day. But actually finding players LIKE this, who are willing to invest the raw time required or who can, is where the real challenge is at. And that is not a healthy form of "Challenging" for keeping players interested in a game mode, because there is absolutely nothing fun about any of that.

But what is it exactly that makes it such a hassle? This is a question that most certainly deserves answers, and these answers should be reviewed by Arenanet for the sake of any & all of their future designs. I guess the best way to explain this is with a flow chart that shows what I've noticed from my subjective experiences as to why raids became such a hassle in the long run.

  1. Raids are first released. At first, everyone is excited to play with anyone and learn the raids the way that they need to learn the raids. Guilds are getting together and devising their own team comps to deal with mechanics and everyone was enjoying the challenge, because at this point the challenge was toying around with different build structures, team comps, and playing with friends while doing it. It is important to note that during this phase, it was drawing players together, new and veterans alike. This is healthy.
  2. Some time passes and the first youtube raid completion videos & guides are posted. Players begin to copy & paste these methods or at least run something similar so they can more easily achieve raid completion. This begins to bring in a small amount of discrimination vs. players who aren't practicing these methods or even players who haven't yet heard about them.
  3. Eventually, certain websites begin to display "raid metas" with very detailed information & methods on how to complete raid bosses. inevitably, the players who copy & use these methods are the ones who begin to frequently & reliably complete raids. Inevitably, everyone wants to play with these players for raid completion, so inevitably they become sticklers for making the players they teach, use the same methods that they are using, which is listed raid meta. It's no surprise that this would happen, and it's a good thing that it did so that players could begin to more reliably complete raids. However, things brings in even more discrimination vs. not only new players who are inexperienced, but also players who may not be on a preferable class for an exact team comp even though what they are running is perfectly capable of completing the raid with the group. It even created discrimination vs. known good players who chose to run meta variants. At this point, some segregation begins.
  4. DPS meters become popular. It's no longer adequate to just have the right build and be in the right comp. New players begin having a difficult time finding decent PUG groups to learn with because veteran players are beginning to segregate themselves from new & casual players. They are at the point where they only want to play with very rehearsed players who are capable of completing raids in a timely fashion. Veteran players begin only inviting new players to actual guild teams, when they need to teach new players to fill in schedules. And even if a player knows the routines and is perfectly capable of completing every raid, if he is a Warrior that deals less DPS than some other Warrior in the guild, he'll be benched and never find a spot in the elite team that runs serious completions. He'll be waiting for that "training night" or that special night when the better Warrior didn't sign online. The DPS meters begin to bring in unhealthy levels of discrimination & segregation. Unfortunately, many new & casual players began to get tired of dealing with that, so they just leave the scene. Even though they are perfectly capable of performing their job role and completing raid bosses "albeit a bit slower than normal". The funny thing is that, if they had started raids upon release, they would have been right there in the learning process, and given plenty of time to master the raids, in the same way that the veterans have mastered them. But because they started late, they now have to deal with this discrimination & segregation, which makes the learning process to even get involved in raids, too much of a hassle to even want to deal with for most players.
  5. The nail in the coffin = KP systems. Here is where discrimination & segregation becomes not only unnecessary but also an imminence front that does nothing but create hassle to get involved in the game mode. It is unnecessary because it doesn't take 100 LIs for a player to master some said given wing. It is an imminence front because players can just ping fake LIs anyway. The KP systems in this game do not matter or prove anything. They serve to do nothing but create even more discrimination & segregation between players who ping those LIs, and players who don't. Regardless of if any of those players are good or not, it's just more discrimination & segregation, which has served to do nothing but damage the teaching & learning process between veterans and the new. The veterans want to avoid the new players like the plague unless they need to teach someone else to fill a role, and the new players who are looking to get serious have to wait in line for decent groups to consider even wanting to touch them with a 10 foot pole, even though that player has already nearly mastered each raid. It begins to not feel like a game anymore. It begins to feel more like an employment process, where the new player has to fill out an application and wait vs. other new players who have done the same thing, to see if the employer has a need to pick them up and reluctantly teach ANOTHER new player. It isn't fun anymore, it proves nothing, and it is only a hinderance to true value. We've all had it happen in PUGs, where some guy pings his LIs but he sucks. We wasted time picking him up. We've all had it happen before in PUGs where some guy says "I dunno I've only done this once or twice" then the guy comes in and plays perfectly. We all know that when eyeing new guild joins for a slot in an elite squad, we don't care if that person has 0 LIs or 9000 LIs. We know that it only matters how he performs on that first night he's given a chance to play with the team. Again, I cannot stress enough that KP systems serve only as a way to break apart community cohesion, create discrimination, which creates segregation, which creates the great hinderance of the teaching & learning process between veteran & new players, which ultimately can lead to the complete stagnation of a game mode.
  6. So now it's about the hassle. Is it worth it? Is it worth staying to play this game mode if you've already gotten the rewards/achievements out of it that you wanted as a veteran? Is it worth it as a new player? Is it worth it to get invested in this game mode to even want to try for rewards/achievements with that kind of hassle behind it? I mean come on now, people do want true challenge in a game, but they don't want their game to feel like a job that is demanding on their schedule. People want to be able to sign in and play when they want to play, and log off when they want to log off. And if they do commit to some scheduled activities with others, the majority of players like to keep those commitments small and within reasonable time frame. Due to all of the above points listed, raids sort of become too much to deal with, too much hassle.

Raids became too much of a hassle because of a few decisions in design, which inevitably led to the evolution of the game mode's sociology as listed above ^

  1. 10 man groups. This was awesome at first, before strong player expectations occurred. After all of the discrimination & segregation began, forming & maintaining 10 man groups based on the expectations of meta, dps meters, and KPs, ended up not being such an easy thing to do.
  2. Expectations kind of HAD to happen for realistic raid clear times, due to the in-game design of things like count down timers that result in situations like this: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Enraged_(Sabetha) So of course the players must design the team comp around such parameters. It's not like they had a choice but to use a universal source of organization & operation such as snowcrows, to keep things practical for the purposes of creating/joining raid squids whether or PUG or Guild Affiliated. Without pushing an elite meta sociology where everyone agrees to use the same method, finding & forming groups that work and actually completing raids, would be as difficult as day 1 release experimentation in wing 1. Which ironically enough, is when people were having the most fun.
  3. Creating a currency like LIs for players to even begin judging each other on. The whole idea of providing some specific currency that can be pinged for KPs, is just a bad idea to implement into any game mode for all of the reasons I have already mentioned, especially the part about how you can only really judge a player by their actual performance. The way to keep a game mode like this healthy, is to design it so that it propagates more player base instead of losing it. Over the years, with any of the game modes, I've noticed that new players remain interested when veteran players play with them. This is for a few reasons. 1) They get to learn from the veteran play which allows them to grasp the game mode more quickly. 2) They feel accepted by the community instead of shunned. This is what people are looking for who choose to play an MMORPG. 3) Even if the new player strays from the game mode or game entirely, the hardcore veteran gives that player a reason to hover back, because he knows there is a reliable player base in that game or game mode, that he KNOWS, that he's FRIENDS with, that is always there that will play the game with him. Even the veteran players feel good when they have some reason or incentive or safe situation to be able to interact with and teach new players. <- But it is unlikely that enough of this will happen, when everything in the game mode is designed to encourage veterans & new players to avoid each other. And that is where we are at now. The hassle to get involved and maintain interest is just a lot of stigma to take on. For most people, it's too much to be fun.

Fractals on the other hand, going back at what @"Zagerus.8675" was talking about:

  1. Has tiers 1, 2, 3, 4, and then CMs. Players can begin learning content at their own pace and at their own learning curve. They can just randomly join a T1 fractal with other players who have no idea what they're doing, and have fun while completing it and getting a dose of what that fractal is about. They can then slowly evolve up into T4 play, with little to no discrimination along the way. Players may meet meta checks in T4s but by then they'd be ready to take the advice. Due to this effect, the LFG system WORKS for T4 fractals and CMs. PUGing WORKS in fractals because everyone who is playing T4s & CMs, well most of them anyway, have gone through that game given orientation of t1 t2 t3 t4 towards that level of play. The design of fractals allows players to start bad, and grow good at their own pace. Raids do not provide anything like this.
  2. 5 man parties. Much easier to organize. There are also many ways to organize 5 man groups between 9 classes. So between different mixes of parties and different instabilities, it keeps the game play fresh and different instead of being so telegraphed and predictable, such as running with an elite 10 man raid squad. Due to these little variations in night to night play, it keeps things JUST interesting enough, to where it actually doesn't get boring.
  3. Completing a full round of CMs/T4s/Recs usually takes about 45 minutes to an hour on average, and it is completely worth the rewards. It's rare to have problems like in raids where, players keep joining and then dropping out and then you have to look for players again. This is because a 45 minute to an hour run is reasonable on time frame so people stay until it is complete.
  4. You don't need an elite guild based around player scheduling to get a good fractal run. You simply need to log in whenever you want, and list a proper LFG if that's what you're aiming at. Due to the nature of how t1 t2 t3 t4 evolution works, there are always plenty of new players INTRODUCING THEMSELVES to fractals, and self evolving into T4 play, for all of us to pick up in the LFG. It doesn't require some dedicated job like schedule for a veteran to go out of his way to teach these new players. They pretty much teach themselves, outside of maybe some side advice from veteran players that they happen to run with, which brings me to the next point.
  5. Recs. Here is how "Leaves No Hero Behind" meets "Combat Medic" and teaches him how his build can be better. The recs are a GREAT design because it allows veteran players a real reason to run with newer players. The recs are also easy to the point that the veteran knows he can carry so he won't get so frustrated with the new players, but rather say "Hey, I notice your DPS is low. You should check out this website. I can show you how to run that build if you'd like." and then they complete the recs together, and there is no animosity, and they both friend each other, and now the new player has someone he can learn from. A way into the world of T4. This does not work this way in raids. There is no reason such as Recs, for veterans to safely without frustration, interact with new players.
  6. The final point, the one that keeps people running casually every night. The T4s are challenging in the right way. It's not a hassle to find a group. The organization time in my experience is usually less than 5 minutes unless I'm queueing early morning eastern, which it may take 10 to 15 minutes to form a CM party at times, which really isn't bad actually considering off peak hours for something like CMs. The T4 fractals themselves are actually pretty difficult content at times. Depending on the instabilities given and the party formed, sometimes you may have to leave the party and find a new one, or maybe kick a player out who clearly lied about his experience level, but for the most part it's just difficult enough to present focused challenge night to night, and it's different enough to remain interesting because of the variation in players joining and the instabilities. In no way are fractals as telegraphed as old dungeons or raids. They are also just EASY enough, to where veteran players can safely allow that new guy they met, the combat medic, into their T4 group to show him the ropes, if he has his AR ready to go. This is because, although the mechanics in T4s & CMs are not unlike raids, the fractals do not have mechanics like a count down to Sabetha Enrage. So there is plenty of time literally, for a veteran to be patient with his new friend the combat medic, in some boss fight. As long as the guy or guys the veteran is teaching can survive, they can eventually complete the fractal. The new players don't need to be passing some DPS check of excellence. Which means veteran players don't generally discriminate unless the player is SO BAD that it is required to boot him and find someone else to be able to complete the fractal. Simply put, this final point is that different demographics of players can play together in fractals, without hassle. And that is what makes fractals successful. An natural in-game design of Community Cohesion.

The raids need:

  1. Tiers of difficulty similar to fractals. This way new players can safely join random squads of other new players, and begin learning mechanics together. The rewards can be god awful that's fine. They just need a way to become involved without having to find ways around segregation to do so. And INB4 "Oh they can form there own squads already and begin learning together" because as I've already pointed out, fractals has a much larger player base than raids because of the new player's ability to self-introduce themselves to the game mode through several tiers of evolution. What raids require players to do, is the equivalent of if a new player was to get dropped into a T4 group for the first time with absolutely no experience ever playing t1 t2 t3. This would obviously create discrimination & segregation exactly like raids have, discouraging players from becoming involved, and lowering player base due to that.
  2. To turn LIs into a bag currency, like fractal relics, so people stop requesting to see pings. Just remove all KP indicators. Envoy's Herald is another story, not much we can do there, but I highly doubt too many groups would ever request to see this title.
  3. Remove effects like Sabetha's count down Enrage, and don't code in anything else like that. Sure, it's a way of making things difficult and pressuring, but it does create problems with discrimination & segregation, concerning teams wanting the highest DPS value players and often ignoring players & benching them because they roll a bit less DPS, even though that player is perfectly capable of completing the raid, even if it takes 1 more minutes than usual.
  4. Maybe some kind of a special weekend event that promotes RAIDS. Maybe during this weekend event, commander who are tagged, who complete raids with new players, can get some kind of enhanced reward. Give the veterans a reason to reach out to new players at least. Even though I don't believe in this kind of "lure by reward" design, something like this could work for propagating player base.

Welp, I hope this doesn't get buried under a heap of responses and never read. I kind of feel like this was a good write.

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@Trevor Boyer.6524 said:Honestly I don't know about that man. I actually log in and run T4 fractals and occasionally CMs if I'm in the mood, just for something to do to get the PvE game crave out of the way. It has little to do with the gold/wealth gain, as I already have 9 characters outfitted in meta setups for all game modes, and I have plenty of liquid gold to work with already. Sure, getting rewards is nice. It helps me play fashion wars. But really, I run fractals because I still feel focused and alert when I run them, for all of the reasons that @"Zagerus.8675" mentioned. I still run fractals because it doesn't take an inordinate amount of time to organize, like raids do.

Yes, but players like you are the exception not the rule. People are doing fracs because it's fun/interesting AND rewarding. Take the rewards away and people will play less that is to say when they are really in the mood to play that content not on a daily basis as it is now. I heard it so often in chats and voice channels: "Haven't done fracs yet, anyone wanna join." This won't happen if rewards are getting gutted to oblivion.Dungeons are a good indicator for that even though people got burned out. Still addicted players are running them, some on a regular basis with the knowledge that the rewards aren't that bad but overall if you ask around about dungeons a lot of players are stating the same: "Not worth any longer."

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  • 5 weeks later...

@maddoctor.2738 said:It's interesting to note that Vale Guardian has the same statistic as Fractal level 75 (73 is the exact value, at 30.5%), meaning less players proceeded to Fractal T4, than killed Vale Guardian. Also worth noting is that those beating Sabetha and reaching Fractal level 100 have the same number (20%).

That % represents the players that killed VG at least once? I wouldn't say that killing a raid boss once or twice equals the popularity of playing fractals several times a week. Most people seem to keep going to fractals very often, while for raids several just kill the bosses once for achievement or grind until get PVE legendary and quit raiding.

I agree with OP, content for 5 players attracts more people since it has lower waiting time.

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@xDudisx.5914 said:I wouldn't say that killing a raid boss once or twice equals the popularity of playing fractals several times a week.

Yes because there is no good reason to kill a Raid boss more than once per week. And I'm not sure you can calculate with any data how many times players are killing bosses and how many are playing fractals several times in a week. Judging by LFG listings I wouldn't say that there are so many players running fractals like that but there is little else to use

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@maddoctor.2738 said:

@"xDudisx.5914" said:I wouldn't say that killing a raid boss once or twice equals the popularity of playing fractals several times a week.

Yes because there is no good reason to kill a Raid boss more than once per week. And I'm not sure you can calculate with any data how many times players are killing bosses and how many are playing fractals several times in a week. Judging by LFG listings I wouldn't say that there are so many players running fractals like that but there is little else to use

1) No data, just empirical evidence and common sense. Other than few "hardcore" players, you don't see many people running daily weekly after they unlocked the PVE legendary armor. As for fractals, even some of my wvw and spvp friends run them daily. You also picked stats from wing 1, the first to be release, when raid was "the new stuff". I doubt the stats for wings 5 and 6 are as higher as wing 1.

2) About LFG, well for fractals they fill in a couple minutes or even seconds, for raids some pugs have to wait way longer in LFG. Also half of the posts are for selling runs...

3) It is easier to find 4 players to form a group of 5 than it is to find 9 players to form a group of 10. That is quite obvious. Requiring more people makes content less accessible. The less accessible the content, the smaller the playerbase it can atrackt/reach. Finding enough people with the proper class and skill is part of difficulty. If they release a raid that requires 50 people instead of 10, don't you think it would be harder to set up a squad?

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Raids are too monolithic, they should've been broken up into smaller segments. On top of this, while there's no problem with ten man groups, five man should be the minimum and the raid should scale beyond that (including rewards) if the group gets extra players.

Similarly though I think the player limit for fractals should be increased.. all content should be "5-10man".

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But let's suppose that % of people registered in gw2 efficiency is a valid indicator of popularity and replayability. We have:

Envoy Armor II: Refined Armor : 9.04%

W5 most unlocked achievement: 10.1%W6 most unlocked achievement: 9.04%W7 most unlocked achievement: 5,57%

W1 most unlocked achievement: 30.39%W2 most unlocked achievement: 18,79%W3 most unlocked achievement: 27,00%W4 most unlocked achievement: 23,95%

Looks like that people are more interested in the legendary armor the PVE legendary armor than anything else. Wings that are not needed for legendary achievement have 50% or 75% less people completing the achievement at least once. Wing 1 is higher than all the others, probably because it was the first to be released.

Also we are talking only about people that have bothered to register in gw2efficency and that is not really a good representation of the more average casual player.

As for fractals we have several achievements with higher than 70%, some with even 80%. Even 99CM is higher than most raid achievements (14,9%). Fractal master (76-100) is 17.7%, also higher than most raid achievements from w1-4 and higher than all achievements from w5-7. You just cherry picked VG and W1 stats to support your assumption.

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