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@Dante.1508 said:

but I can tell you the map is meta-focused with a push-and-pull feel similar to WvW in a PvE setting.

Yeah that there will never bring me back as pver i detest WvW and meta so having it as a core pve experience is like saying leave GW2 and uninstal, which i feel after reading that i should.. That sounds terrible.. as is WvW to this day.

I for one just wanted more core tyria experiences..

Do You hate Silverwastes as well?

Yes with a passion.

You said that:

@Dante.1508 said:

but I can tell you the map is meta-focused with a push-and-pull feel similar to WvW in a PvE setting.

Yeah that there will never bring me back as pver i detest WvW and meta so having it as a core pve experience is like saying leave GW2 and uninstal, which i feel after reading that i should.. That sounds terrible.. as is WvW to this day.

I for one just wanted more core tyria experiences..

Do You hate Silverwastes as well?

Very much so i avoid it like a plague unless hot story forces me there.. I only do hot for map completions on alts... i also avoid the other map below it as well.

Sorry for the late reply i moved on from GW2 as i said above, i just popped back to see if anything changed.. i seems only nerfs for pvp again.. yes that will bring customers back for sure.
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@Strider Pj.2193 said:

but I can tell you the map is meta-focused with a push-and-pull feel similar to WvW in a PvE setting.

Yeah that there will never bring me back as pver i detest WvW and meta so having it as a core pve experience is like saying leave GW2 and uninstal, which i feel after reading that i should.. That sounds terrible.. as is WvW to this day.

I for one just wanted more core tyria experiences..

Do You hate Silverwastes as well?

Yes with a passion.

You said that:

but I can tell you the map is meta-focused with a push-and-pull feel similar to WvW in a PvE setting.

Yeah that there will never bring me back as pver i detest WvW and meta so having it as a core pve experience is like saying leave GW2 and uninstal, which i feel after reading that i should.. That sounds terrible.. as is WvW to this day.

I for one just wanted more core tyria experiences..

Do You hate Silverwastes as well?

Very much so i avoid it like a plague unless hot story forces me there.. I only do hot for map completions on alts... i also avoid the other map below it as well.

Sorry for the late reply i moved on from GW2 as i said above, i just popped back to see if anything changed.. i seems only nerfs for pvp again.. yes that will bring customers back for sure.

Yes my apologies i came back at different days and thought i had not responded.. I'm not very active in GW2 lately so i don't keep tabs on the forums much.

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In regards to the raids I just wish there was a raid guide in game, also some backstory as to what's going going on and why. And a small strategy guide on boss mechanics, I mean you know it's senseless for heroes to go fight a boss without a plan.

I still to this day do not know why we kill the things we do in them. WvW just needs to stop trying so hard to be an RTS and more about warfare/pvp.

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  • 6 months later...

@"bOTEB.1573" said:I wonder, how were the last 8 months? Did strikes manage to get more people into raids? I just hope that we will see more raids in the near future.

Nope strikes did not trick me (don't know about others)into trying the elitest raids. No thanks, I hope Anet goes back to their roots.

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@Fire Attunement.9835 said:

  • Raids are a trickier beast. They're a unique experience and community that we want to find better ways to support, the biggest challenge in creating more is the small audience they attract. We gathered data to determine why, and the most common answer was that there is a giant leap in difficulty between raids and other endgame content, and there isn't anything to help players work their way up.

Further to this - the biggest obstacle for many people to get into Raids is actually other players and their join requirements equating to having more or less mastered the content already by linking LI. I fully understand why most Raiders do this and I'm sure you and the rest of the team do, too, but it compounds the problem you mention with respect to difficulty.

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@"bOTEB.1573" said:I wonder, how were the last 8 months? Did strikes manage to get more people into raids? I just hope that we will see more raids in the near future.

As a player that generally doesn't participate in raids, strikes weren't a big draw for me. However, I will say that they remove the primary barrier for entry that keeps me out of raids. The issue with raids is that I can join a training run and start on the ground floor, but if I want to progress I'm either being carried by a group that already knows the mechanics or I'm forming a static group for progression raiding. The latter representing a pretty huge leap from just opening LFG and joining a group for half an hour, from a casual player perspective.

Meanwhile strikes are easier and more importantly they are just 1 boss! If your raid group struggles with VG, you're going to waste a bunch of time on that. Then when you get to an arguably more difficult boss next, you might have time to take a shot or two at it before you give up and try again next week. That's fine if you have a static progression group or join a guild that can walk you through it until you get caught up, but if you're just trying to pop in for some play every now and then it really isn't worth your time.

Don't get me wrong. I was a raid leader back in my WoW days and I understand the draw to this type of content and what it takes to progress. My point is that a lot of casual players simply aren't interested in making that investment. Strikes might be more to their liking due to convenience, but I doubt that's going to convince them to do what it takes to get deep into raiding.

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@"bOTEB.1573" said:I wonder, how were the last 8 months? Did strikes manage to get more people into raids? I just hope that we will see more raids in the near future.

I have played raids in other MMOs but for some reason the concept of raids in GW2 personally doesn't appeal to me. Strikes haven't interested me either and I have ignored them since I don't care about the rewards. Maybe it's because I just prefer the style of the open world content in this game as opposed to the instanced content.

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Fact is, the small percent of the player base that raids is not going to get a big population boost from strikes. If you want to bring more players to raid content, especially casuals, you must create an easy, medium and hard difficulty with scaling rewards. This allows the mechanics to be learned on an easier setting which will increase the player pool and close the gap to the higher difficulties. Strikes will not accomplish this.

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@Super Hayes.6890 said:Fact is, the small percent of the player base that raids is not going to get a big population boost from strikes. If you want to bring more players to raid content, especially casuals, you must create an easy, medium and hard difficulty with scaling rewards. This allows the mechanics to be learned on an easier setting which will increase the player pool and close the gap to the higher difficulties. Strikes will not accomplish this.

Or they could just stop trying to be WoW, which is a raid centric mmo. GW2 never had and never will have a big raid community. If you want raiding this isn't the mmo you goto. You goto wow or FF14. Instead of doing what they're good at (pve exploration/puzzles/dynamic events)

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About raids, why not adding a story mode where the content is a little easier, and a normal and hard mode(this would be the currrent one).So more people, also casuals and mid-casuals could enjoy it too.This also helps since for some people having a party of 10 is hard depending on timezone and time availability and those people could organize and clear the raid with smaller size parties at easy difficulty.

Don't get me wrong, I like the strike missions and I think the more content the better but if you added them to move people towards raids it is not the right direction in my opinion

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@Super Hayes.6890 said:Fact is, the small percent of the player base that raids is not going to get a big population boost from strikes. If you want to bring more players to raid content, especially casuals, you must create an easy, medium and hard difficulty with scaling rewards. This allows the mechanics to be learned on an easier setting which will increase the player pool and close the gap to the higher difficulties. Strikes will not accomplish this.

According to that logic Fractals of the Mists would have to be really popular in the Guild Wars 2 playerbase, since every fractal has at least four difficulty settings to play it on and the rewards scale up the higher you go. But is FotM really that successful? Why does the game mode not receive more support from the developers if it has a large fan base?

@wrathmagik.3518 said:Or they could just stop trying to be WoW, which is a raid centric mmo. GW2 never had and never will have a big raid community. If you want raiding this isn't the mmo you goto. You goto wow or FF14. Instead of doing what they're good at (pve exploration/puzzles/dynamic events)

Even in WoW raid content is not that widely played. That is the reason why they created LFR, because not enough people were playing raid content.

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@Katary.7096 said:

@Super Hayes.6890 said:Fact is, the small percent of the player base that raids is not going to get a big population boost from strikes. If you want to bring more players to raid content, especially casuals, you must create an easy, medium and hard difficulty with scaling rewards. This allows the mechanics to be learned on an easier setting which will increase the player pool and close the gap to the higher difficulties. Strikes will not accomplish this.

According to that logic Fractals of the Mists would have to be really popular in the Guild Wars 2 playerbase, since every fractal has at least four difficulty settings to play it on and the rewards scale up the higher you go. But is FotM really that successful? Why does the game mode not receive more support from the developers if it has a large fan base?Because at some point devs kind of forgot about what different tiers of difficulty are for.

Different tiers of difficulty are there so people that like different levels of challenge can all be happy playing the same type of content. Notice, that most of those people are not going to graduate from their chosen difficulty tier to a higher one, and only a small number will want to progress through all the tiers.

Feeding new players into the highest-tier community is either a secondary goal, or a byproduct. Main goal of multiple difficulty tiers is justification for increased resource usage for that type of content.

This is not how Fractals work. The lower difficulty tiers are designed as strictly intermediate, transitional type of content. Something you pass through in your way up to the top. As such, ultimately they appeal practially only to those that are both interested in and capable of going all the way up. And with the upper tier being more difficult now than it was at the moment Fractals were at the height of popularity (with devs acting in a way that clearly shows it was not an accidental shift in difficulty), well, it is no wonder it is now significantly less popular than it was then.

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@Fire Attunement.9835 said:Once a full suite of strike missions is complete there should be a graceful ramp up to the existing raid content rather than the imposing leap that previously existed, and our hope is once that ramp is in place, the number of players participating in raids will go up.

I'm sure it will go up somewhat, but I'm also sure most people probably just skip the harder strikes like Boneskinner.

@"Hanakocz.5697" said:The main problem with idea of Strikes as a lure for raids is that even if those people get good there step by step, they can't access raids because the "friendly" community there will not allow them because they don't have killproofs.

This kind of elitism is also present in many strike groups, I try to stay away from elitists, which is pretty difficult these days as raids, strikes and fractals are all plagued with them. The sad thing is probably 90% of those elitists became so because they were given the tools to do so (kill proofs) which then gave them some kind of entitled idea that they are somehow better than other players because they grinded more, despite the fact that KP and skill are not related.

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@Katary.7096 said:

@Super Hayes.6890 said:Fact is, the small percent of the player base that raids is not going to get a big population boost from strikes. If you want to bring more players to raid content, especially casuals, you must create an easy, medium and hard difficulty with scaling rewards. This allows the mechanics to be learned on an easier setting which will increase the player pool and close the gap to the higher difficulties. Strikes will not accomplish this.

According to that logic Fractals of the Mists would have to be really popular in the Guild Wars 2 playerbase, since every fractal has at least four difficulty settings to play it on and the rewards scale up the higher you go. But is FotM really that successful? Why does the game mode not receive more support from the developers if it has a large fan base?

@wrathmagik.3518 said:Or they could just stop trying to be WoW, which is a raid centric mmo. GW2 never had and never will have a big raid community. If you want raiding this isn't the mmo you goto. You goto wow or FF14. Instead of doing what they're good at (pve exploration/puzzles/dynamic events)

Even in WoW raid content is not that widely played. That is the reason why they created LFR, because not enough people were playing raid content.

What game mode does receive a lot of support? They release a short story episode and a new map every few months. We don't really get much else aside from a rare new fractal or a skimpy balance update for competitive modes. Even when they promise to focus on a particular game mode (PvP, for instance) they do nothing and then ghost their player base for months on end.

Fractals seem pretty popular, honestly. The rewards are good and the multiple difficulty modes seem to appeal to a variety of players. I'm not big into GW2 instanced PvE, but I have participated enough in fractals over the years to have reached fractal level 100 and unlocked the infinite mists omnipotion. Meanwhile raids and strikes I have only done a handful of times.

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@Vavume.8065 said:

@Fire Attunement.9835 said:Once a full suite of strike missions is complete there should be a graceful ramp up to the existing raid content rather than the imposing leap that previously existed, and our hope is once that ramp is in place, the number of players participating in raids will go up.

I'm sure it will go up somewhat, but I'm also sure most people probably just skip the harder strikes like Boneskinner.

@"Hanakocz.5697" said:The main problem with idea of Strikes as a lure for raids is that even if those people get good there step by step, they can't access raids because the "friendly" community there will not allow them because they don't have killproofs.

This kind of elitism is also present in many strike groups, I try to stay away from elitists, which is pretty difficult these days as raids, strikes and fractals are all plagued with them. The sad thing is probably 90% of those elitists became so because they were given the tools to do so (kill proofs) which then gave them some kind of entitled idea that they are somehow better than other players because they grinded more, despite the fact that KP and skill are not related.

It seems to me that if you are doing an experienced run you'd want players who are experienced in that content. I've joined training raids before and they spend a ton of time explaining mechanics only to wipe several times practicing the same boss. If you're trying to clear with an experienced group, there's really no room for that. So why wouldn't you ask for proof of experience?

That doesn't strike me as "elitist" so much as just common sense. If raids were easy enough you can just join LFG the way you usually can for fractals, then I'd agree that it's unnecessary. But that doesn't seem to be the case for raids.

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@Blude.6812 said:

@"bOTEB.1573" said:I wonder, how were the last 8 months? Did strikes manage to get more people into raids? I just hope that we will see more raids in the near future.

Nope strikes did not trick me (don't know about others)into trying the elitest raids. No thanks, I hope Anet goes back to their roots.

Nope, strikes didn't bring me into raids either. In fact it was just the opposite. I tried a couple of the early strikes and didn't like them at all. That set my anti-raid sentiment into concrete. I haven't done any strikes since then and won't bother trying raids.

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@Astralporing.1957 said:Because at some point devs kind of forgot about what different tiers of difficulty are for.This statement reads as if it is supposed to answer a question I have raised, but the information within it does not fulfill that purpose. So what am I supposed to do with that?Different tiers of difficulty are there so people that like different levels of challenge can all be happy playing the same type of content. Notice, that most of those people are not going to graduate from their chosen difficulty tier to a higher one, and only a small number will want to progress through all the tiers.Yes, that is so obvious that it would be reasonable to assume that people are generally aware of it.Feeding new players into the highest-tier community is either a secondary goal, or a byproduct. Main goal of multiple difficulty tiers is justification for increased resource usage for that type of content.I know, the same principle is behind the introduction of LFR in WoW, which I had already mentioned in the very post you quoted.This is not how Fractals work. The lower difficulty tiers are designed as strictly intermediate, transitional type of content.Provide supporting evidence.Something you pass through in your way up to the top. As such, ultimately they appeal practially only to those that are both interested in and capable of going all the way up.Provide supporting evidence.And with the upper tier being more difficult now than it was at the moment Fractals were at the height of popularity (with devs acting in a way that clearly shows it was not an accidental shift in difficulty), well, it is no wonder it is now significantly less popular than it was then.Which metrics do you use to track the popularity of fractals over time?So you reckon that the success of FotM is nothing to write home about. That could certainly explain why the game mode is not seeing much support.

@AliamRationem.5172 said:What game mode does receive a lot of support? They release a short story episode and a new map every few months. We don't really get much else aside from a rare new fractal or a skimpy balance update for competitive modes. Even when they promise to focus on a particular game mode (PvP, for instance) they do nothing and then ghost their player base for months on end.

Depends on how you approach it. From an absolute point of view every section of the game is lacking support, at least according to player feedback. But relatively speaking they clearly focus on open world and story content. Prior to the Sunqua Peak update the last time they added a new fractal was January 8, 2019, the last time they added a new CM fractal was July 25, 2017.Fractals seem pretty popular, honestly. The rewards are good and the multiple difficulty modes seem to appeal to a variety of players. I'm not big into GW2 instanced PvE, but I have participated enough in fractals over the years to have reached fractal level 100 and unlocked the infinite mists omnipotion. Meanwhile raids and strikes I have only done a handful of times.Unfortunately that cannot confirm that Fractals are indeed pretty popular. Of course there is the chance that FotM are so immensely well populated, that the devs see no potential gains in increasing support for the game mode. But we simply have no way of knowing.

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@Katary.7096 said:

@Astralporing.1957 said:Because at some point devs kind of forgot about what different tiers of difficulty are for.This statement reads as if it is supposed to answer a question I have raised, but the information within it does not fulfill that purpose. So what am I supposed to do with that?It
does
answer the question, just a bit indirectly. You jsut need to read through the whole post to get that answer.

Different tiers of difficulty are there so people that like different levels of challenge can all be happy playing the same type of content. Notice, that most of those people are not going to graduate from their chosen difficulty tier to a higher one, and only a small number will want to progress through all the tiers.Yes, that is so obvious that it would be reasonable to assume that people are generally aware of it.And that's the core of the issue - no, people are
not
generally aware of it. A lot of people think that different levels of difficulty exist primarily as a form of
progression
. Which is not the same. While this may utilize the same overall base idea, but those two approaches significantly differ in how the priorities are distributed.

This is
not
how Fractals work. The lower difficulty tiers are designed as strictly intermediate, transitional type of content.Provide supporting evidence.Something you pass through in your way up to the top. As such, ultimately they appeal practially only to those that are both interested in and capable of going
all
the way up.Provide supporting evidence.The whole system is clearly designed as a progression mechanic. Agony/agony resistance, unlocking higher fractal levels, rewards from different tiers stacking instead of replacing each other, most of the unique rewards locked behind the highest tier (as well as Anet constantly forgetting about properly scaling lower difficulty tiers anytime they release a new fractal) - all those clearly point to the idea that, instead of picking a difficulty you want and sticking with it, you are meant to start at the bottom and progress to the top. We also got several dev statements to that end, both at the very beginning of fractals, or later on (the one that called Fractals a stepping stone to Raids was especially telling), but in reality we don't even need those to understand the general design and purpose of this system.

So, my answer is that Fractals having several tiers of difficulty doesn't help all that much in their popularity, because they used those tiers not as a means of separating and satisfying people that like different difficulty levels (where all the levels would get the same amount of love and effort), but as a means of progression, with most of the effort concentrated on the very top.

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@Chichimec.9364 said:

@"bOTEB.1573" said:I wonder, how were the last 8 months? Did strikes manage to get more people into raids? I just hope that we will see more raids in the near future.

Nope strikes did not trick me (don't know about others)into trying the elitest raids. No thanks, I hope Anet goes back to their roots.

Nope, strikes didn't bring me into raids either. In fact it was just the opposite. I tried a couple of the early strikes and didn't like them at all. That set my anti-raid sentiment into concrete. I haven't done any strikes since then and won't bother trying raids.

»Strikes will never put me into raids as well... i do content that i like and has the items i need, raids are just visual clutter rewards nothing more.

Maybe Anet should intruce the equivalent for green items from GW1 into the game where bosses could drop specific weapons and amors or other items to use in builds by the traditional style, where that weapon has a unique skin, unique damage type, unique sigil effect, or rune in case being armor, since there nothing unique to raids, besides confeties its labeled as useless content w/o any real drop nor reward.

Gw2 feel very imcomplete for me in quite some areas, gw2 sometimes fieel like a fake game that enforces skins to hide its lack of mechanics gamewide(this is personal opnion of what i sometimes feel whilke playing the game).

Mr. @"Fire Attunement.9835"This is atm what lacks in pve....https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Unique_item

it would make the game feel more GW.

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I think they missed the mark with Strike Missions too. I hate them with a vengeance. The problem is that some (most?)Strike Missions actually need the level of tutorship, handholding and leadership(and Teamspeak) that certain Gaming communities or Guilds would do with Triple Trouble. With Strike Missions, it's either Guilds who have mastered them, or a pick up squad with a high chance of Failure and subsequent Frustration with the people that try them. I read up on Strike Missions beforehand but if there are only a few who do not know what they are doing it is most likely a fail.

I agree with above posters that there should be Scaling in Strike missions, in that each scale adds an extra mechanic. Instead of having to cope with 3-5 mechanics all at once. Or we should get those Community Gaming collectives back who are willing to do these Strike Missions with teamspeak or something. I am convinced that Anet did not see increased numbers for Raids since Strike Missions were introduced. If I am wrong, give me the numbers.

I also think GW2 does not really attract a crowd that is willing to go that extra mile for Raids. I have raided two years in Everquest on high level and it was fun, but I do not want that anymore. And in Everquest raids actually gave Loot that mattered. :) How many people want to go through all that hassle for Legendary Armor that has the same stats? Anet, stick to your roots, the no-power creep adagio works fine. Just not for interesting people in Raids.

Btw, the best way to attract more people to Raids is to introduce Mythic Armor, which has 10% better stats then Ascended. I do not want to be near the explosion when that hits the Forums though. Just writing this, I can feel the heat. :)

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@Tyncale.1629 said:I think they missed the mark with Strike Missions too. I hate them with a vengeance. The problem is that some (most?)Strike Missions actually need the level of tutorship, handholding and leadership(and Teamspeak) that certain Gaming communities or Guilds would do with Triple Trouble. With Strike Missions, it's either Guilds who have mastered them, or a pick up squad with a high chance of Failure and subsequent Frustration with the people that try them. I read up on Strike Missions beforehand but if there are only a few who do not know what they are doing it is most likely a fail...This. Very much this. The last strike mission I did was with a pug. One person in the group actually knew what they were doing and patiently tried to coach the rest of us on what to do. After the third time we were all quickly wiped out, I gave up and haven't done a strike mission or much of the Icebrood Saga since. I had never tried raids as they seemed too daunting to me. When strike missions were introduced as an accessible way to get into raids, I thought I would try them. Nope, all my strike mission experiences were as bad as that last one. If strikes were that terrible, actual raids could only be worse for me. So I've completely avoided both and intend to keep doing so.

Note: I'm 71 years old with a number of health issues. Hard challenges don't excite me or give me a sense of satisfaction any more. They just exhaust me at best and leave me frustrated at worst. If challenging content is something you enjoy, then I'm glad it's there for you. Just know that such content is not for me.

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@"Astralporing.1957" said:It does answer the question, just a bit indirectly. You jsut need to read through the whole post to get that answer.Yes, since you decided to put the relevant part into the second half of the last sentence of your post. Which can effectively be summarized as "Fractals are not that popular anymore." The rest of your post is essentially a bird's eye view of your opinion on the topic of difficulty settings. Which is fine, but if you are going to make a general explanation for something, do not do so via quotation as that implies that you mean to directly address something specific.And that's the core of the issue - no, people are not generally aware of it. A lot of people think that different levels of difficulty exist primarily as a form of progression. Which is not the same. While this may utilize the same overall base idea, but those two approaches significantly differ in how the priorities are distributed.Did I miss the part where someone made the claim that both of these approaches are the same?Personally I do not buy it when people state that they want to see multiple difficulties because it would make for a natural progression. The idea that they pick up a new game and start their first playthrough on easy, then go through it a second time on normal, followed by a third time on hard is simply not realistic. And with steam's statistics on achievement unlocks it is pretty easy to find data to support that position.The whole system is clearly designed as a progression mechanic. Agony/agony resistance, unlocking higher fractal levels, rewards from different tiers stacking instead of replacing each other, most of the unique rewards locked behind the highest tier (as well as Anet constantly forgetting about properly scaling lower difficulty tiers anytime they release a new fractal) - all those clearly point to the idea that, instead of picking a difficulty you want and sticking with it, you are meant to start at the bottom and progress to the top.Yes, that is a logically sound explanation as to why it makes sense that they would have designed it this way. But here's the problem: If someone could prove that there exists a decently sized group of players who play fractal content somewhat frequently and do so exclusively on tier two, your explanation means nothing. The developers may very well design any element in the game with a particular intention, that alone does not guarantee its outcome though.We also got several dev statements to that end, both at the very beginning of fractals, or later on (the one that called Fractals a stepping stone to Raids was especially telling), but in reality we don't even need those to understand the general design and purpose of this system.Can you provide the source for the "Fractals are a stepping stone to Raids" statement? Would be quite contradictory to their stated reasoning for creating strike missions.So, my answer is that Fractals having several tiers of difficulty doesn't help all that much in their popularity, because they used those tiers not as a means of separating and satisfying people that like different difficulty levels (where all the levels would get the same amount of love and effort), but as a means of progression, with most of the effort concentrated on the very top.I see.

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@Katary.7096 said:

@"Astralporing.1957" said:And that's the core of the issue - no, people are
not
generally aware of it. A lot of people think that different levels of difficulty exist primarily as a form of
progression
. Which is not the same. While this may utilize the same overall base idea, but those two approaches significantly differ in how the priorities are distributed.Did I miss the part where someone made the claim that both of these approaches are the same?Personally I do not buy it when people state that they want to see multiple difficulties because it would make for a natural progression. The idea that they pick up a new game and start their first playthrough on easy, then go through it a second time on normal, followed by a third time on hard is simply not realistic. And with steam's statistics on achievement unlocks it is pretty easy to find data to support that position.I'm not talking about other games. I am talking about this one. Just look at the cases where whenever easy mode is mentioned the silent assumption by most is that the only reason to have it is for easy mode be some sort of a training content that people are meant to graduate from (and thus no need for rewards and stuff). When in reality this should be at best a secondary concern.

The whole system is clearly designed as a progression mechanic. Agony/agony resistance, unlocking higher fractal levels, rewards from different tiers stacking instead of replacing each other, most of the unique rewards locked behind the highest tier (as well as Anet constantly forgetting about properly scaling lower difficulty tiers anytime they release a new fractal) - all those clearly point to the idea that, instead of picking a difficulty you want and sticking with it, you are meant to start at the bottom and progress to the top.Yes, that is a logically sound explanation as to why it makes sense that they would have designed it this way. But here's the problem: If someone could prove that there exists a decently sized group of players who play fractal content somewhat frequently and do so exclusively on tier two, your explanation means nothing. The developers may very well design any element in the game with a particular intention, that alone does not guarantee its outcome though.The original intention behind content does influence how people are going to be using it, but does not completely prevent some people to try to use it in ways that were not part of the original design. Still, those would be the exception, not the norm.

We also got several dev statements to that end, both at the very beginning of fractals, or later on (the one that called Fractals a stepping stone to Raids was especially telling), but in reality we don't even need those to understand the general design and purpose of this system.Can you provide the source for the "Fractals are a stepping stone to Raids" statement? Would be quite contradictory to their stated reasoning for creating strike missions.Can't find it anymore. It was somewhere shortly after HoT release, during the height of Raid hype (probably in one of the reddit AMAs then, but it's been so long that i can't be 100% certain about it - might have been the previous forums too). And it's not contradictory - quite the opposite, it's a sign that their thoughts are
still
influenced by progression ideas, even if they are designing for a mostly non-progression game. In those years they might have moved with this idea from one of the content types to another, but they still cling to the idea of "stepping stones" and still seem to think that this time it might work better.(or they no longer think so, and it's just a PR speak meant to placate the raiders and give them some hope - that possibility also exists)

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