Is it time for a change to the Fractal CM system?

[Jokuc.3478]

With a new Fractal CM coming up soon and hopefully more in the future, daily fractal runs are getting longer and longer. Instead of having people do 5 CMs + the daily tier 4 + 3 recs (if you do those) every day would it make sense to also have maybe 2 "daily CM" like we do with the regular T4s? This way you'd get more variation in your daily runs, and it won't take as long. Now of course this would mean some adjustments needs to be made for the loot such that it's still as profitable as it currently is doing all 4, but that should be easy. This way fractals also won't go out of control with how profitable it is, imagine having 7 daily CMs + T4s every day, that's some silly numbers. The dailies could be indicated by a red icon to set them apart from normal dailies, for example. Thoughts?

https://imgur.com/a/i8xvb2U

Edited May 14 by Jokuc.3478

[Dark Red Killian.3946]

I second this. I like having new fractals to play, but with each new CM, it's making we want to play less and less because of the amount of time it takes to play them all. If there could be daily CMs that would be great. They could even go a step further and create CMs for existing fractals too, so basically you could do the daily T4's as CMs and complete both for the loot needed. All in all, I'd like a variety rather than doing the same CMs each day. It just gets exhausting doing them all now and by mixing it up, makes it fresher to play every day.

[Mascarun.7910]

Just now, Dark Red Killian.3946 said:

I second this. I like having new fractals to play, but with each new CM, it's making we want to play less and less because of the amount of time it takes to play them all. If there could be daily CMs that would be great. They could even go a step further and create CMs for existing fractals too, so basically you could do the daily T4's as CMs and complete both for the loot needed. All in all, I'd like a variety rather than doing the same CMs each day. It just gets exhausting doing them all now and by mixing it up, makes it fresher to play every day.

Anything but Aquatic Ruins CM, not that I beg you. 

 

But I agree. We are going to have 5 daily CMs, and Lonely Tower CM might be even more gross to pug than Silent Surf CM. 

[Deadringers.9047]

4 hours ago, Jokuc.3478 said:

With a new Fractal CM coming up soon and hopefully more in the future, daily fractal runs are getting longer and longer. Instead of having people do 5 CMs + the daily tier 4 + 3 recs (if you do those) every day would it make sense to also have maybe 2 "daily CM" like we do with the regular T4s? This way you'd get more variation in your daily runs, and it won't take as long. Now of course this would mean some adjustments needs to be made for the loot such that it's still as profitable as it currently is doing all 4, but that should be easy. This way fractals also won't go out of control with how profitable it is, imagine having 7 daily CMs + T4s every day, that's some silly numbers. The dailies could be indicated by a red icon to set them apart from normal dailies, for example. Thoughts?

https://imgur.com/a/i8xvb2U

You do know that you don’t have to do all CMs each day right? 

even if there are 10 CMs, you can just choose your favourite few and do those.

[Aaron Forestman.4758]

1 minute ago, Deadringers.9047 said:

You do know that you don’t have to do all CMs each day right? 

even if there are 10 CMs, you can just choose your favourite few and do those.

You don't have to do any content, but many groups are still going to want to do the whole set for the sake of maximizing daily profits. It would be nice to compile the daily CM rewards into a couple of them, but that does get rather messy as doing a CM that isn't a daily shouldn't be without a reward. I doubt they'll be making a change to this system anytime soon, though they did make Silent Surf CM slightly less profitable than the others with the lack of an ascended ring or salvage use like all the others had.

[Gop.8713]

This seems kind of like asking anet to save you from yourself. You should be able to decide on your own when you're doing too much and need a break? Nothing is being 'forced' here, you'd be amazed how many ppls manage to struggle through the game just fine without doing any cms at all ; p

[emtea.6931]

To those saying it's not "forced" - while you are right in that no one is forced to do anything in the game, in another way, it kinda is forced - the LFG usually lists full CMs + T4s

It is very rare to see groups that are looking for less than all CMs. I am aware that you can make your own group, but if you're making a group for less than the "accepted standard" by the community, you'll end up waiting longer for it to fill than having just run the extra fractals.

Assuming the new fractal becomes 100 and pushes the other fractals down 1, and assuming the 15 day rotation fractal numbering doesn't change, then with the new CM a full clear would have 8 days out of 15 where one of the CMs is a T4, and 1 day of those 8 where 2 CMs are also T4s.

If would be amazing if the 15 day rotation could be revised to always include at least 1 fractal from the 96 to 100 range

[Arladk.8654]

Two daily CM fractals may be too little imo, but I love the idea! I'd say make 3 (red) daily CMs for the sake of simplicity. It would go nicely with the 3 daily recommended fractals and 3 daily fractals. Also, while we are at it make the daily recs icon green!

Speaking of changes to fractal systems, a frac CM leaderboard would be great (start at activation, end at killing last boss). There is also a need to soon revisit the fractal tier system, seeing as the 23rd fractal is about to be released, thus inching closer to having 25 unique fractals. You could squish the four tiers into three, add a fifth tier, or even allow more than 25 fractals per tier.

[AliamRationem.5172]

How about this?  Add the option to run any CM in place of a daily or rec.  That would mean that once we have 6 or more CMs, players who enjoy running CM would no longer also need to run dailies and recs in order to receive the fully daily fractal reward.

[Nimris.3781]

i am definitely against reducing number of available fractal cm dailies for now, for a couple of reasons

1. first off, cm+t4 for decent (i.e not training) group takes less than 1h (less than 50min with cm as daily). this is not much and often people go do rec afterwards as well. even if we get new cm, time will increase by 8-10min which is still reasonable for now.
2. if for some reason you consider it too much, you can do cm+t4 every second or third day and focus on what intrests you. (be it collection, meta events, raiding etc.) why force less dailies on everyone, when there are plenty of people who enjoy doing cm's?
3. moreover you can always create cm's only group. these do appear sometimes, albeit rarerly
4. each cm has unique rewards, meaning that if we got daily on only 2 cm per day, chances of getting them would drop drasticaly.
5. this also brings topic of currency from cm's, currently we get 160 ufe and ~800 fractal relics+8pristine i think? this would have to be redistributed just like many other rewards
6. pugging would also become horror, silent surf + observatory? empty lfg. sunqua + nightmare? plent yof incompetent players and wipefeast. splitting cms would also mean, people would gain experience in much slower rate. suddenly 5k ufe group would become training party
7. finally even less players would care about condi + power, which would drop average cm's experience a lot (condi thief on shattered, power dps on kanaxai)

overall the current system is still fine as it is. we are far from point where it becomes too much to do on daily basis

i would rather see they make 1 cm as t4 daily on each day for almost everyday, this would lower completion time and make cm's a bit more appealing

we can get back to this topic when we reach 7+ cm's and they dont change system by that time.

[Sobx.1758]

Are daily fractal and cm fractal rewards so bad that they need to have their gph imrpoved? Because that's the only thing this thread tries to achieve and I don't really agree. There's nothing that makes it necessary for you to keep min-maxing your daily rewards if you don't feel like it.

As far as I understand, what's happening here is this:
1. I like running fractal cms/dailies because of the rewards I get!
2. More fractals are introduced, which means I can get more rewards daily, but I'll need to add more time to get more rewards.
3. I don't want for it to take more time soooo.... condense the rewards, so the gph I'll be getting will be in multiples of the current one while taking less time than it does today!

I mean... what a weird "gimme". It doesn't make sense to me. Don't want to run more fractals for more rewards? Then don't.

Edited May 15 by Sobx.1758

[Jedrik.3109]

2 minutes ago, Sobx.1758 said:

Are daily fractal and cm fractal rewards so bad that they need to have their gph imrpoved? Because that's the only thing this thread tries to achieve. And I don't really agree. There's nothing that makes it necessary for you to keep min-maxing your daily rewards if you don't feel like it.

This.

Fractals CMs are some of the most profitable gph in the game.

What is with the takes in this forum lately. I feel like I'm in some bizarre mobile game community or I'm really just to old to get it.

[ZephidelGRS.9520]

Whatever they do, I want them to remember that Fractals used to be the mindless quick farm tightly optimized so that you could run the objectives in approximately 1 hour. People don’t run Fractals for fun, that’s what Raids/Strikes are for and Fractals are for farming. The old CMs were a nice addition for hardcore players, but bloated as they were they are ultimately still balanced with that in mind time-wise.

Now it’s starting to be a weird cross-breed between quick dungeon-lite and time-consuming pseudo-Strikes. I know that Surf days are skip days for most people, especially the days where Sunqua is also one of the objectives. If the new one also turns out to be a HP bloat then I don’t want Anet to touch Fractals any time soon.

Edited May 15 by ZephidelGRS.9520

[TexZero.7910]

I don't find it that time consuming at all.

Might be a bias due to running in a static and doing CM's and T4's only but that usually only takes 45minutes.

[emtea.6931]

19 hours ago, Arladk.8654 said:

Speaking of changes to fractal systems, a frac CM leaderboard would be great (start at activation, end at killing last boss). 

Fractal leaderboards were announced only 3212 days ago, surely they will be introduced any moment now!

[Arladk.8654]

I think you guys are hyper-focused on the loot topic and the latter part of Jokuc's post missing the most important part.

The current system incentives players to do all CMs daily. With Anet commiting to fractals going forward that effectively means clears will get progressively longer (6-10 minutes) on a yearly basis. That is fine for now, but will present problems in the coming future. It will effectively be splitting the LFG into two distinct categories: FCs and partial clears (of different variations either due to concern of time or preference). Naturally, these groups will also be subject to different experience/skill reqs (i.e. ufe or titles). As a result of this, "queue time" will increase dramatically across the board.

This is a great suggestion for reasons completely outside the realm of FOMO and rewards.

With regards to loot, expect fractal CM rewards to get heavily nerfed in the future, unless a change to the system comes. Fractals funnel a huge amount of wealth into the game economy and you can't continuously add more fractals and keep the daily rewards at the same (tremendously high) level. We already saw a minor nerf to rewards in Silent Surf. Expect a larger one for The Lonely Tower and subsequently released fractals. To combat pain points you could consider giving all non-daily CMs a relic and ufe reward for new fractal players.

Edit for clarity: By adding a cap to daily CM rewards you can keep w/e level of rewards you deem sufficient to stay consistent across new fractal CM releases.

Edit 2: My god the more I think of this suggestion, the better it becomes. It also incentivizes new players to play more CMs than experienced players, thus slowly bridging the ufe and skill gap. Also combats ufe req inflation.

Edited May 15 by Arladk.8654

[emtea.6931]

for those that are saying CMs and T4s only takes less than 1 hour, please remember not everyone's groups are the same. for those that pug the group can be pretty variable, impacting the time. 

There's also the time it takes for the group to fill, which depending on your time zone (I play in oceanic time, pugging fractals around reset+10.5 hours) can take some time to fill.

then we have the variability in the fractal length, for example the day when you get Deepstone, Molten Furnace and Siren's Reef ends up being quite a long day. I know it's not the topic of this thread, but I don't think anyone would complain if some of those longer fractals were optimised a little more. Wouldn't take much, for example if Deepstone final boss only jumped around every 20% instead of every 10% and only did the spectral flames thing once, that would shorten that fractal decently.

[Nemesis Ghost.5782]

As others said, maybe they should do it like recs + t4 achievements. Daily 3 random CMs from the pool. for rewards. That leaves the incentive for hardcore groups to keep doing all their CMs if they want while leaving the lesser hardcore groups to just do the dailies.

[AliamRationem.5172]

3 hours ago, Nemesis Ghost.5782 said:

As others said, maybe they should do it like recs + t4 achievements. Daily 3 random CMs from the pool. for rewards. That leaves the incentive for hardcore groups to keep doing all their CMs if they want while leaving the lesser hardcore groups to just do the dailies.

But fractals are already rewarding enough.  So a better solution would be to let players who prefer to run CMs just run CMs instead of feeling compelled to run T4s and recs for the reward.  Just add CMs as an alternative option to the daily/rec rewards.  Your first 3 CMs each day provide the T4 daily reward and your second 3 CMs reward the rec rewards.  We don't have 6 CMs yet, but we will.

[MercurialKuroSludge.8974]

6 minutes ago, AliamRationem.5172 said:

But fractals are already rewarding enough.  So a better solution would be to let players who prefer to run CMs just run CMs instead of feeling compelled to run T4s and recs for the reward.  Just add CMs as an alternative option to the daily/rec rewards.  Your first 3 CMs each day provide the T4 daily reward and your second 3 CMs reward the rec rewards.  We don't have 6 CMs yet, but we will.

Even better if the weekly T1/T2/T3s also count "T1...OR ABOVE scales".
Cuz 15x T1s / 12x T2s / 9x T3s just to get the same weekly bonus as 6x T4s is honestly pretty weird.
They just need to change the objective/achieve structure.

[Zohane.7208]

On 5/14/2024 at 4:05 PM, Jokuc.3478 said:

With a new Fractal CM coming up soon and hopefully more in the future, daily fractal runs are getting longer and longer. Instead of having people do 5 CMs + the daily tier 4 + 3 recs (if you do those) every day would it make sense to also have maybe 2 "daily CM" like we do with the regular T4s? This way you'd get more variation in your daily runs, and it won't take as long. Now of course this would mean some adjustments needs to be made for the loot such that it's still as profitable as it currently is doing all 4, but that should be easy. This way fractals also won't go out of control with how profitable it is, imagine having 7 daily CMs + T4s every day, that's some silly numbers. The dailies could be indicated by a red icon to set them apart from normal dailies, for example. Thoughts?

https://imgur.com/a/i8xvb2U

Any change in this direction would inevitably lead to same reward for less effort or more reward for same effort. In either case it would increase the amount of rewards per effort, which really isn't needed since fractals are already really rewarding.
IF, however, a system could be devised that doesn't increase the effort/reward balance while adding daily CM, sure.

[Arladk.8654]

1 hour ago, Zohane.7208 said:

IF, however, a system could be devised that doesn't increase the effort/reward balance while adding daily CM, sure.

You remove all CM-specific rewards from non-daily CMs and tie them to the daily CM reward system. Doing a non-daily CM would essentially be the same as doing any other non-daily fractal. I'd still recommend having non-daily CMs give players UFE (lets new players "farm" ufe and the currency is essentially worthless from a liquid gold perspective).

[Jokuc.3478]

23 hours ago, Sobx.1758 said:

Are daily fractal and cm fractal rewards so bad that they need to have their gph imrpoved? Because that's the only thing this thread tries to achieve and I don't really agree.

I don't care about making more gold per hour, the purpose for this suggestion is

1. More variety for each run
2. Making sure run times don't get 5-7 minutes longer each time they add a new CM
3. Regulating the profits in fractals so it's LESS profitable than what it would be if we have 7 daily CMs.

For fractals it doesn't really matter as much about the gold per hour, it's the total profit of a full CM+T4 run because you can't grind dailies over and over for the additional daily rewards. Adjust the loot such that it is a bit less of what it is today, maybe the same total value of what it was when we had only 3 cms (I suggested same as now in OP with the assumption that people would get mad when hearing "less rewards"). People aren't just doing 1h fractals then stop, they complete a run. So after the update when we have 5 CMs, or in the future maybe 7 as mentioned, that is a ridiculous amount of money for 1 daily run, which can be reduced by having 2 dailies. So you would have a slightly higher gold per hour unless people would agree to nerf it even more (which I would be open to, by the way), but the total profit will be lower.

[maxwelgm.4315]

Having an in-game daily fractal CM system is a neat idea and it's quite weird people would oppose it - we also have "money wing" for raids which is also a neat idea! It would also allow to keep overall fractal gold in check regardless of how many CMs they want to introduce, in a very easy way that also introduces daily variety to players and the nice little dopamine boost of ticking yet another daily box. There is zero reason to dislike daily CMs as a concept other than just disliking things (and because you cannot dislike things in this forum, people pretend confusion 🙂 )

[AliamRationem.5172]

22 minutes ago, maxwelgm.4315 said:

Having an in-game daily fractal CM system is a neat idea and it's quite weird people would oppose it - we also have "money wing" for raids which is also a neat idea! It would also allow to keep overall fractal gold in check regardless of how many CMs they want to introduce, in a very easy way that also introduces daily variety to players and the nice little dopamine boost of ticking yet another daily box. There is zero reason to dislike daily CMs as a concept other than just disliking things (and because you cannot dislike things in this forum, people pretend confusion 🙂 )

If that were true, then they wouldn't place limits on daily activities.  The reason they do is so that players don't feel compelled to burn out on the gameplay (Yes, I'm aware that self-control is a thing.).  So, no, we don't need even more daily fractals.  Having said that, I do agree with the idea of CM dailies.  I would just implement them differently.  Instead of having CM dailies + T4 dailies + daily recs, I'd give players credit toward T4 dailies and daily recs for completing CMs.  In other words, completing 6 CMs (if we had that many) would grant the full daily fractal reward without requiring players to touch T4 and lower tier fractals at all.

That way it's your choice.  Want to go for the easy loot just the way it is now?  Or, if you prefer CM, now you don't have to run low tiers.  You can just stick to CM and get your daily loot, too.