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Raids Without Downed State


Usian.1278

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@maddoctor.2738 said:

@Teratus.2859 said:Well to be fair, some old maps are still quite popular, Silverwastes for example is still one of the best farms in the game.

Also to be fair when Swamps of the Mists or 40 farm existed they were way more popular than T4 CMs.

Yes! I'd forgotten about the 40 farm.. that was really popular if I remember correctly.

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@Teratus.2859 said:

@Teratus.2859 said:Well to be fair, some old maps are still quite popular, Silverwastes for example is still one of the best farms in the game.

Also to be fair when Swamps of the Mists or 40 farm existed they were way more popular than T4 CMs.

Yes! I'd forgotten about the 40 farm.. that was really popular if I remember correctly.

Swamp of the Mists and the 40-farm were both extremely popular and they were popular for the same reason Silverwastes is popular, a lucrative reward/effort ratio. And while the amazing fractal farms were removed from the game, causing less players to run fractals as a whole, the amazing farm called Silverwastes is still alive and kicking. It's the exact same reason why AB multi loot and Istan were so incredibly popular.

The argument was that Fractal CMs decreased the popularity of Fractals, but it's rather obvious the removal of farms did way more than that (and the lack of content obviously). Just take a look at the popularity of Istan (or Auric Basin) these days. On the other hand, do we really want to call content "popular" when it is over-farmed for its lucrative reward/effort ratio? Does that make the content popular because it's GOOD/EXCITING or because it's the best way to get rewarded?

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@Astralporing.1957 said:

@Astralporing.1957 said:CMS becoming a standard for fractal t4 runs did a lot about decreasing fractal overall popularity.

2 out of 98 cant be blamed for fractal decreased popularity, maybe its becouse they arent being updated.It's not a case of "2 out of 98". It was a case of the top tier of fractal players moving to "T4+cm" runs, and essences/LNHB appearing as LFG requirements, separating the fractal community into the far less numerous "experienced" group, and the rest. It might have had no noticeable immediate impact on those experienced players, but the end effect was a decrease among the "middle tier" players (and, eventually, almost complete disappearance of this player group among the fractal runners).

And all of it happened long before Anet stopped developing new fractals, by the way. That was just a last nail in the coffin.

I remember the lfg during that time as well as well after we got 100cm. You had lnhb runs sure but alot of the runs were also just t4 and recs.

Before t4 and cms the top players were doing just t4s with food and pots, at that time which group was the middle group? T3?

I mean if you can bring facts you could change my mind here but i can just as easily say that going from lw s3 levels of fractal content to s4 lvls of fractal content coupled with random instabs, coupled with fractals that alot pf ppl found underwhelming or flat out bad (last decent fractal imo was with the release of pof) coupled with the months and months of nothing really killed the engagement.

You could argue the same thing happened with lw post hot, those 9 months of nothing story wise really hurt the lw scene but the interest mostly recovered post drought because the content cadence was far more sustainable. You may ask "Why hasnt the raid interest or the fractal interest recovered with new releases?" and the answer to that is because ppl dont want new content only, they want a better cadence thats more sustainable to their interests as well (like ppl wanted a new expansion so they could justify sticking around).

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@maddoctor.2738 said:

@Teratus.2859 said:Well to be fair, some old maps are still quite popular, Silverwastes for example is still one of the best farms in the game.

Also to be fair when Swamps of the Mists or 40 farm existed they were way more popular than T4 CMs.

Yes! I'd forgotten about the 40 farm.. that was really popular if I remember correctly.

Swamp of the Mists and the 40-farm were both extremely popular and they were popular for the same reason Silverwastes is popular, a lucrative reward/effort ratio. And while the amazing fractal farms were removed from the game, causing less players to run fractals as a whole, the amazing farm called Silverwastes is still alive and kicking. It's the exact same reason why AB multi loot and Istan were so incredibly popular.

The argument was that Fractal CMs decreased the popularity of Fractals, but it's rather obvious the removal of farms did way more than that (and the lack of content obviously). Just take a look at the popularity of Istan (or Auric Basin) these days. On the other hand, do we really want to call content "popular" when it is over-farmed for its lucrative reward/effort ratio? Does that make the content popular because it's GOOD/EXCITING or because it's the best way to get rewarded?

Well popular generally means a lot of people are into the same thing.. If you ask me it doesn't really matter why it was popular just that it was popular.

But yeah I agreed it wasn't the CM's, at best they could be a contributing factor specially post farm killing but definitely not the cause of the pop drop.Generally I agree with you on this one, killing the farms definitely was a much bigger part of it than anything, even the lack of new content.New fracs are great and all but if the old farms are still better than any new content then people are going to go back there, Silverwastes again being proof of that one.

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@Cyninja.2954 said:

@Astralporing.1957 said:CMS becoming a standard for fractal t4 runs did a lot about decreasing fractal overall popularity.

2 out of 98 cant be blamed for fractal decreased popularity, maybe its becouse they arent being updated.It's not a case of "2 out of 98". It was a case of the top tier of fractal players moving to "T4+cm" runs, and essences/LNHB appearing as LFG requirements, separating the fractal community into the far less numerous "experienced" group, and the rest. It might have had no noticeable immediate impact on those experienced players, but the end effect was a decrease among the "middle tier" players (and, eventually, almost complete disappearance of this player group among the fractal runners).

And all of it happened long before Anet stopped developing new fractals, by the way. That was just a last nail in the coffin.

No, you have that backwards.

Fractal popularity decreasing is in large part due to lack of new content.Considering that the population was already dwindling by the time Twilight Oasis was released, i'm quite sure that lack of the new content was not the primary reason. Sure, when Anet stopped developing new fractal content, it did have a significant negative impact on the fractal population, but that population was already much, much smaller than it was before Shattered Observatory. You probably don't see it, because that eariler decrease didn't affect top fractal players - in fact, introduction of CMs made that small subsection of fractal community probably stronger (for a while, at least). That is also why you attribute all the problems to lack of content - because that was something that did affect top players as well.

What you don't see is that most of the semi-casual T4 puggers, that, before Shattered Observatory, were good enough to run T4's with no problem, but were either not good enough, or not dedicated enough to "graduate" to CM runs, disappeared long before Anet stopped developing new fractals. This caused most of the newer players, that just climbed through t1-t3 ladder up to t4, to have noone to group with (because the t4+CM groups, for obvious reasons, avoided them like a plague). With the obvious result of many of them also giving up on the content.

Those who run CMs are already a majority of more committed players. They are sticking with the content they invested time into mastering or are in general more "hardcore" players. The "middle" tier players falling away is mostly because they are given a choice: become more proficient and start doing CMs or not, thus remaining in the pool of weaker players in T4. Many then simply decide to eventually quit given no new content or challenge.Mostly true, with the caveat that most of those players stopped playing fractals when Anet was still developing new ones, so it wasn't lack of new content that chased them away. Notice also, that a lot of those players were dedicated enough to stick with fractals before Anet started adding new ones and only left after the addition of Nightmare and Shattered, so, again, the cause of them leaving seems to lie elsewhere.(also, before the "midcore" t4 players left, they were the majority, not the top players. Those that became CM runners were only a very small subsection of the whole fractal community. They are now a majority only because most of other players left)

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@"Teratus.2859" said:Well popular generally means a lot of people are into the same thing.. If you ask me it doesn't really matter why it was popular just that it was popular.

I disagree with this idea. Take 10000 players that play Fractals. 5000 of those are running the "40 farm" and the other 5000 are spread around the rest of Fractals. Fractals on paper and some vague / useless metrics appear to have a popularity of 10000 players, but since half of those are not actual fractal players but hardcore farmers of a specific subpart of the content, they aren't really interested in any new fractal additions to the game. Yes if they "leave" the overall fractal population would look reduced, but for the health of the game mode is that a bad thing? I'd say no, because the amount of "40 farmers" aren't healthy players of the content and won't support future fractals, unless they have same ludicrous results as the content they play. In my opinion those "farmers" aren't good population for Fractals.

Back in the old days the number of players running the first path of Citadel of Flame was gigantic, in the same "popularity" metric it meant Dungeons was some of the most popular game modes of the game. But were dungeons (as a game mode) really THAT popular? Or the number of players running dungeons were inflated by CoF P1 farmers? If you remove outliers from a game mode, you get a more accurate idea of actual / healthy popularity of it, and I think THAT popularity (how many play the content because of the content, and not the rewards) is far more important and valuable.

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@Astralporing.1957 said:

@Astralporing.1957 said:CMS becoming a standard for fractal t4 runs did a lot about decreasing fractal overall popularity.

2 out of 98 cant be blamed for fractal decreased popularity, maybe its becouse they arent being updated.It's not a case of "2 out of 98". It was a case of the top tier of fractal players moving to "T4+cm" runs, and essences/LNHB appearing as LFG requirements, separating the fractal community into the far less numerous "experienced" group, and the rest. It might have had no noticeable immediate impact on those experienced players, but the end effect was a decrease among the "middle tier" players (and, eventually, almost complete disappearance of this player group among the fractal runners).

And all of it happened long before Anet stopped developing new fractals, by the way. That was just a last nail in the coffin.

No, you have that backwards.

Fractal popularity decreasing is in large part due to lack of new content.Considering that the population was already dwindling by the time Twilight Oasis was released, i'm quite sure that lack of the new content was not the primary reason. Sure, when Anet stopped developing new fractal content, it did have a significant negative impact on the fractal population, but that population was already much, much smaller than it was before Shattered Observatory. You probably don't see it, because that eariler decrease didn't affect top fractal players - in fact, introduction of CMs made that small subsection of fractal community probably stronger (for a while, at least). That is also why you attribute all the problems to lack of content - because that was something that did affect top players as well.

What you don't see is that most of the semi-casual T4 puggers, that, before Shattered Observatory, were good enough to run T4's with no problem, but were either not good enough, or not dedicated enough to "graduate" to CM runs, disappeared long before Anet stopped developing new fractals. This caused most of the newer players, that just climbed through t1-t3 ladder up to t4, to have noone to group with (because the t4+CM groups, for obvious reasons, avoided them like a plague). With the obvious result of many of them also giving up on the content.

Those who run CMs are already a majority of more committed players. They are sticking with the content they invested time into mastering or are in general more "hardcore" players. The "middle" tier players falling away is mostly because they are given a choice: become more proficient and start doing CMs or not, thus remaining in the pool of weaker players in T4. Many then simply decide to eventually quit given no new content or challenge.Mostly true, with the caveat that most of those players stopped playing fractals when Anet was still developing new ones, so it wasn't lack of new content that chased them away. Notice also, that a lot of those players were dedicated enough to stick with fractals
before
Anet started adding new ones and only left after the addition of Nightmare and Shattered, so, again, the cause of them leaving seems to lie elsewhere.(also, before the "midcore" t4 players left,
they
were the majority, not the top players. Those that became CM runners were only a very small subsection of the whole fractal community. They are now a majority only because most of other players left)

I dont understand how we know that cm runners are the majority now, where are the stats that say cm runners didnt quit in droves but the mid core that was doing just t4s did quit in droves.

At most what i recall is that ppl were fine up until shattered popped up and not because shattered had a cm but because the baseline t4 was alot harder than what was the baseline dificulty of t4 back then for these ppl it never was a matter of they cant do cms because they werent doing them in the first place it was because content they could previously complete they couldnt now, for many it was the first time they couldnt do a t4 and they were skipping it. (for many others it was just another fractal they would skip, along with other previously unenjoyable fractals).

Again tho you ignore the fact that despite us getting content throughout post hot the cadense changed alot over those 4 years.

We went from 4 ~ 5 months for a new fractal or a rework or both to 8 then to 4 to 7 then to 7 again and now to 21 months give or take. This isnt a sustainable cadense and everyone that was playing alot of fotm could tell you that.

If anything throught the last 4 years the group that struggled the most were the cm runners, because for every cm we got there was also a base mode to satisfy the mid core (in theory) and all the fractals post shattered have been regular t4s.

Yet the scene struggled overall, if we look at lw we can say that the story group suffered alot post hot because they didnt have content,yet it slowly recovered because they came back with a consistend and healthy schedule. S4 saw struggled again with large delays to lw and after that anet deceided to change the format to the lighter but more consistent s5 format.

We we can take from this is that lw never snowballed as hard as fractals or raids did because it never had as bad or infrequent updates as those pieces of content. Looking at the new fractal announcement, specifically the fract that it has a cm says that anet intent to try and recapture the fractal playerbase, midcore and cm runners alike.

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@maddoctor.2738 said:

@"Teratus.2859" said:Well popular generally means a lot of people are into the same thing.. If you ask me it doesn't really matter why it was popular just that it was popular.

I disagree with this idea. Take 10000 players that play Fractals. 5000 of those are running the "40 farm" and the other 5000 are spread around the rest of Fractals. Fractals on paper and some vague / useless metrics appear to have a popularity of 10000 players, but since half of those are not actual fractal players but hardcore farmers of a specific subpart of the content, they aren't really interested in any new fractal additions to the game. Yes if they "leave" the overall fractal population would look reduced, but for the health of the game mode is that a bad thing? I'd say no, because the amount of "40 farmers" aren't healthy players of the content and won't support future fractals, unless they have same ludicrous results as the content they play. In my opinion those "farmers" aren't good population for Fractals.

Back in the old days the number of players running the first path of Citadel of Flame was gigantic, in the same "popularity" metric it meant Dungeons was some of the most popular game modes of the game. But were dungeons (as a game mode) really THAT popular? Or the number of players running dungeons were inflated by CoF P1 farmers? If you remove outliers from a game mode, you get a more accurate idea of actual / healthy popularity of it, and I think THAT popularity (how many play the content because of the content, and not the rewards) is far more important and valuable.

You're not wrong, though wouldn't you want the bigger number to count anyway if you enjoy the game mode?In the sense of continued resources invested and new content added.

If you kill off a valid farming method in certain content and then see a huge percentage of the playerbase leave that content, doesn't that overall hurt everyone who does enjoy it?Least with those farmers there the devs could say hey there's 10,000 people playing Fractals we should make more!! rather than there's only 5000 people playing fractals lets put new fractal content on the back burner.

I generally agree with what your saying about it being better that people play because they enjoy it, but i'm hardly going to turn down a decent chunk of players who want to play it their own way if it means the pop numbers get buffed up, if that gets people who play fractals because they enjoy it more new fractals to enjoy I really can't complain, would certainly be better than an alternative where the content becomes stale and neglected imo.

I would point out that during the hight of dungeon popularity though there really wasn't much else in the game at that time that counted as End game content.. PvP and WvW were there but being Gw2 is a largely casual appealing game the vast majority of players were pretty much PvE only.Until Fractals came along Dungeons were more or less all most people had, and even afterwards they remained somewhat popular for a while as well, likely becuase they were familiar and people enjoyed playing them, even the farmers until that got restricted.

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@"Teratus.2859" said:You're not wrong, though wouldn't you want the bigger number to count anyway if you enjoy the game mode?In the sense of continued resources invested and new content added.

No I wouldn't want to add the bigger number. That's because part of the bigger number are players not interested in seeing the game mode grow. Let's take a look at Istan farmers, they inflate the number of players that love open world meta events. The next few meta events weren't very successful, Sandswept Isles, Kourna and so on. Dragonfall became a huge success because it competed with Istan rewards (and Istan was nerfed)

Other example is Path of Fire itself. HOT made big meta events popular, so they added many of those in POF too. But their reception wasn't very good.

In a similar manner, I doubt the "40 farmers" had any desire to try Shattered Observatory or Twilight Oasis, giving the impression that the newer maps weren't popular compared to the overall population of fractals when in reality they might've been as popular as most maps, except the farm maps.

If you kill off a valid farming method in certain content and then see a huge percentage of the playerbase leave that content, doesn't that overall hurt everyone who does enjoy it?

In my opinion no. Because as I said above, when a valid farming method is nerfed, there are two options: a) the player will find another valid farming method or b) the player will leave the content. Maybe they should've done what they do with the open world, keep at least one lucrative super farm active in Fractals at all times, just to inflate the numbers and increase the overall popularity. Every time they nerf an open world farm, they add another one, so there is always one super rewarding open world map available. In that case yes I agree it might've changed dev opinions on which content to cater to.

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@Dadnir.5038 said:The issue with more reward is that it's more attractive.The most attractive soon become the standard.Players find it's harder to meet the standard, they turn themself toward what the one that meet this standard play.Some professions aren't used to meet this standard and it created complains that those professions are weak.Players that are downed will also take the brunt of the toxicity (maybe even kicked without a word).

All in all, you just increase the requirement of the meta and lower skilled players end up adding a layer of toxicity. More reward is a terrible idea, sorry.

False.99 and 100 cm give more loot but there are plenty of squads who run 99 and 100 without cm.

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@Zaraki.5784 said:

@Dadnir.5038 said:The issue with more reward is that it's more attractive.The most attractive soon become the standard.Players find it's harder to meet the standard, they turn themself toward what the one that meet this standard play.Some professions aren't used to meet this standard and it created complains that those professions are weak.Players that are downed will also take the brunt of the toxicity (maybe even kicked without a word).

All in all, you just increase the requirement of the meta and lower skilled players end up adding a layer of toxicity. More reward is a terrible idea, sorry.

False.99 and 100 cm give more loot but there are plenty of squads who run 99 and 100 without cm.

You can do fractal everyday if you want, you can do raid once a week. Keep this in mind.

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@maddoctor.2738 said:

@"Teratus.2859" said:You're not wrong, though wouldn't you want the bigger number to count anyway if you enjoy the game mode?In the sense of continued resources invested and new content added.

No I wouldn't want to add the bigger number. That's because part of the bigger number are players not interested in seeing the game mode grow. Let's take a look at Istan farmers, they inflate the number of players that love open world meta events. The next few meta events weren't very successful, Sandswept Isles, Kourna and so on. Dragonfall became a huge success because it competed with Istan rewards (and Istan was nerfed)

Other example is Path of Fire itself. HOT made big meta events popular, so they added many of those in POF too. But their reception wasn't very good.

In a similar manner, I doubt the "40 farmers" had any desire to try Shattered Observatory or Twilight Oasis, giving the impression that the newer maps weren't popular compared to the overall population of fractals when in reality they might've been as popular as most maps, except the farm maps.

Farmers are always going to pick the most rewarding maps to farm, that's never going to change in these kinds of games since farming is always about most possible rewards for time invested.The only thing Anet could do about that is restrict it.. and they have tried to do that by nerfing farms and trying to get people to run meta's in a daily chain rather than farm one map/event chain over and over.This isn't a terrible idea but it can lead to a players feeling like it's not worth their time when there are so many of them to run and they vary so much in difficulty and time requirements.This could be argued is a problem with the oversaturation of living world maps more than anything.. another issue some have brought up in the past as a negative against living world content in favour of expansions.

In fractals specifically there is only X amount of dailies per day so there is far far less incentive to play the fractals that are not part of that current daily.That might be fixed by having every fractal give a one time daily reward on top of the named dailies so you're encouraged to play all of them at least once a day.. but it's not a guaranteed fix.. if the fractal is too long or has tedious moments it would still end up being skipped most of the time.That could be argued is a problem with the design of the fractal more than anything else.. hence why COF was farmed to hell and other dungeons were completley ignored.For example in Deepstone there is a part where you have to use the special action ability to make a path over a pit.. I think we can all agree that this is a really, really tedious part of the fractal that slows us down for no good reason and makes some people not want to play this fractal at all.Being that fractals were designed to be quick dungeons I can't blame anyone who would think negatively about Deepstone because of that particular part of it.It hurts the quick dungeon run that most people want from fractals and it also kills any farming potential the fractal could otherwise have.

If you kill off a valid farming method in certain content and then see a huge percentage of the playerbase leave that content, doesn't that overall hurt everyone who does enjoy it?

In my opinion no. Because as I said above, when a valid farming method is nerfed, there are two options: a) the player will find another valid farming method or b) the player will leave the content. Maybe they should've done what they do with the open world, keep at least one lucrative super farm active in Fractals at all times, just to inflate the numbers and increase the overall popularity. Every time they nerf an open world farm, they add another one, so there is always one super rewarding open world map available. In that case yes I agree it might've changed dev opinions on which content to cater to.

That's pretty much what I was saying, killing the farm making players leave hurts everyone who enjoys the content because the lower population means less incentive for Devs to focus on new content.Population is always going to be a big factor when it comes to Devs justifying where to spend their resources on new content.. this is pretty much why PvE gets so much time and the rest of the game gets much much less..It's unfortunate but I honestly believe the only thing that can ever really change that is if those more neglected areas of the game get a big population boost to justify the devs time and attention.Admittedly though.. it's again not a guaranteed fix either.

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@"Teratus.2859" said:It's unfortunate but I honestly believe the only thing that can ever really change that is if those more neglected areas of the game get a big population boost to justify the devs time and attention.

Yes that's why I said to keep one part of the game, one Fractal, one Raid, one Strike, super ludicrous in terms of rewards so farmers go there and inflate the numbers of those running the entire game mode. After all, that's what all the farm maps do for the Open World, so a similar "system" could work in the other game modes. But it doesn't look like Anet is willing to do that.

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