Competitive Dungeons/Fractals/Raids

[Trevor Boyer.6524]

So I had a discussion on discord last night with a bunch of my pvp buddies. These are guys who just never touch pve. I had a thought come to mind and I asked them: "If pve was competitive would you play it?" They ask me: "Well what do you mean?" I said: "Lets say there were little boards outside of each dungeon, just like HoT content at puzzle games, and they displayed the top 10 clear times and guild team name that did it for that month. This little board could also be present for all T4 fractals or maybe just the CMs. Then raids would be the same. At the end of the month or something, automated rewards are sent to the players who participated in the top 10 clear times." Every single one of them said that actually sounded pretty fun and would give them a reason to do pve content while still having it keep that competitive feel. The more they talked about it they just started saying "Why hasn't this happened yet?"

 

If Anet wants a way to stoke the fire of pve content, there it is.

 

[runeblade.7514]

If this suggestion requires a significant investment of resources then I would not support it. If it is quick and easy to implement then I wouldn't mind it.

 

This wouldn't be stoked the PvE fire for me.

[Nephalem.8921]

You mean something like Fractal Leaderboards?

 

That would be great. Anet really needs to announce such great feature that wasn't already announced once or maybe twice in the past.

[TexZero.7910]

It's pointless.

 

Trying to make PvE competitive is literally the last thing any company wants to do, nor does it stoke any PvE fire. It's a feature wasted on people who don't actually know what they want.

 

You know what does stoke PvE fires, content. Something we havent had in 3 months.

[Tyson.5160]

> @"TexZero.7910" said:

> It's pointless.

>

> Trying to make PvE competitive is literally the last thing any company wants to do, nor does it stoke any PvE fire. It's a feature wasted on people who don't actually know what they want.

>

> You know what does stoke PvE fires, content. Something we havent had in 3 months.

 

It’s the regular cadence of Living World. I enjoy the regular breaks better then the fast pace of Season 1. Mind you this cadence has been around summer 2016, so this clearly the way that the pve content will be delivered.

 

Perhaps if these leaderboards provided additional rewards for ranking.

[Mourningcry.9428]

It's not a great leap to predict that these leaderboards would be pretty much static... sure, the rankings might change a bit from month to month, but the same guilds/accounts would make up the top, if not the entire list without fail...

 

If you limit it to one ranking per guild, the top guilds can create alt-guilds to fill additional rankings. If you limit it to one ranking per account/guild, no doubt many of the veteran runners have multiple accounts to fill additional ranks.

 

Ultimately, this would just provide additional rewards to a very, very, very few people.

 

That aside, there's the issue of hacks/cheats.. Even if Anet was able to stop third party hacking tools, there are numerous in game questionable techniques, that wouldn't be so easily detectable...

 

Back when speed running was a thing, the community imposed it's own set of restrictions to qualify for a record run, in addition to providing video proof in order to be validated... No such proof/restrictions could be imposed easily here.

 

There are techniques/strategies/consumables which new runners simply would never have been exposed to, or have access to, and would remain completely unaware of which would put them at an insurmountable disadvantage to veterans...

 

Fractals and Raids are arguably less exploitable, but even then, the advantages certain guilds have over the majority are pretty much absolute.

 

Even if the rewards were garbage, bragging rights would be enough for these guilds to hold the rankings - they did them in the past for nothing, and for a smaller audience.

 

So, no... it's not the best of ideas.

 

 

[TexZero.7910]

> @"Tyson.5160" said:

> > @"TexZero.7910" said:

> > It's pointless.

> >

> > Trying to make PvE competitive is literally the last thing any company wants to do, nor does it stoke any PvE fire. It's a feature wasted on people who don't actually know what they want.

> >

> > You know what does stoke PvE fires, content. Something we havent had in 3 months.

>

> It’s the regular cadence of Living World. I enjoy the regular breaks better then the fast pace of Season 1. Mind you this cadence has been around summer 2016, so this clearly the way that the pve content will be delivered.

>

> Perhaps if these leaderboards provided additional rewards for ranking.

 

I'm not ignorant to the cadence. My point is, if you want people to give a flying quaggan about PvE, you need to have lasting PvE content. Not a time trial, not a Leaderboard. You need content that spans the time of the development cycles, not pieces that last for roughly 2-4hrs depending on if you care about anything more than the story.

 

Adding rewards to leaderboard like this wouldn't do anything either, it doesn't add longevity to the game and has never done so in any game with timed dungeons/leaderboards. They become a dead feature utilized by less that 1% of the playerbase.

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

It seems to me that adding new Leaderboards would be a poor investment of dev time, as it appeals to a limited group of players, mostly only for short periods of time. And there are some potential downsides.

 

The problem with Leaderboards is that they are very attractive to a fraction of players and unattractive to a different fraction. Those who expect that game to be casual (whatever "casual" actually means) are disconcerted by a pop up showing how quick (or slow) they are relative everyone else. And those outside the top five quickly lose interest.

 

In the heyday of dungeons, there was a website that tracked speedclears. It offered a way to distinguish "restricted runs" from "anything goes" (and occasionally some rewards). And it was never all that popular, except (again) among that subset of folks that care about being fastest. It's hard to imagine any in-game leaderboard being able to identify "restricted runs" at all, not without a lot of dev time.

 

So whatever amount of work it takes to add Leaderboards to dungeons (or other PvE content) is going to have limited value, mostly in the short run.

 

 

[Faaris.8013]

Nah, let the PvP bunch stay away from the main player base and we stay away from the PvP bunch, it's better that way. There is already some toxicity in fractals and raids, no need to get them in.

[Tyson.5160]

Then keep it as it is, status quo. The issue is, that as each year goes by, gw2 becomes older and older and things like accessibility becomes larger and larger. In terms of the game life, this probably the longest game that Anet has supported, so we are probably diving into some uncharted territory for gw2. So whatever they have to do to bring people in.

[Randulf.7614]

Fractal Leaderboards were once something to be implemented - they were dropped. Given that adventures, activities and Achievements points have a competitive element to them and haven't really driven a surge of players to them, I suspect they realised competitive gaming beyond pure pvp is not really a big thing and I think that is a lot down to the fact that GW2 is built strongly on a spirit of coopertaion and does that (mostly) really well.

[GrubySzymek.1362]

Fractal leaderboards were one of HoT advertised features. They never happened.

[Trevor Boyer.6524]

1. Competitive scenes are the end game of any game. A given game's competitive scene being good or bad, will declare its longevity. Within the type of game genre we are discussing, this is true. It is also true with most genres of games, including stranger things like board games, card games, or childhood games like hide & go seek. The only time this is not true, is if we are talking something like Minecraft or The Sims, which is largely based around creative outlet. This is the difference between painting a picture or playing a game of Poker. The name of the game we are discussing is "Guild Wars 2". When purchasing such a game title, I would expect there to be plenty of competitive aspects concerning guilds vs. guilds, especially after having played its predecessor title, Guild Wars 1.

2. It's not difficult for Arenanet to watch a player's screen and investigate whether they are cheating or not.

3. Argue all you want that "this won't stoke the fire of pve" but I have personally spoken with several other players/guilds with run pve content, particularly raids, with high level elitist attitude and these players ALL would absolutely love to see competitive leaderboards. **It was brought up in one discussion that this would actually encourage and give more purpose to streaming pve content and for people to watch it.** Unfortunately, these are the types of players who don't bother with coming into this forum unless they have some serious complaint. Oddly enough, I seem to only see negative buzz kill users who respond in this forum. It doesn't even matter how good an idea is, these users just post "no no no no no" with their ears plugged, because anything different is something they don't want. In fact, these users never actually contribute anything productive at all. The only they do is comment about how pissed off they are after Arenanet changes something, even if the change was good. Also, don't bother responding with "how we don't want more elitist attitude" after all the defense for elitism that I witnessed in this thread -> https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/24707/raid-elitism-happening-in-fractals/p1

4. Players were not attracted to the HoT puzzle game leaderboards because the puzzle games are too short/small and become boring after you master them, not to mention the negligent rewards. Some of those games were a pain in the ass to master and the only real incentive to ever complete them to begin with, was the mastery points. If you were to run leaderboards for 99CM 100CM, Raid CMS or even something like Arah Paths, with monthly rewards, you'd get a lot of participants and I'll guarantee that. Again, sit and argue all the reasons why you "no no no no no" this idea but I don't see how you can even begin to convince yourself that leaderboards/monthly rewards/guild recognition would somehow NOT draw in a much larger player base and purpose to the old content.

5. This idea would not disturb general LFG play for dungeons/fractals/raids because the idea here is that a named guild team would be required to enter for these runs. So intrinsically, the only people doing this would be elite teams who are part of the same guild. This will not create more elitism within LFGs, it will actually reduce it. As this idea will draw the line between PUGing and a real reason to join a good guild who has elite teams, who don't need to PUG. There would be less elitism in the LFGs due to the elites playing with 5 man teams for speed clears, instead of PUGing in the LFG.

6. We are talking about year 6 of Guild Wars 2. The game is what it is. It is highly doubtful that we will ever see some large overhaul of older game content. Even if they did this, there are so many old players now that the content would be mastered by the end of the first day and you know it. The only thing that could possibly be added to keep older content relevant after already mastering it and obtaining all the rewards, is a competitive aspect to go back to. Some reason to run your mastery vs. someone else's mastery. <- That is the quintessential fire behind any game in human history that has ever had longevity.

 

If competitive dungeons/fractals/raids were to happen, the game would feel a little bit more like Guild Wars.

[Kundry.1249]

WoW borrowed heavily from GW2 Fractals for their Mythic+ system (scaling, affixes), and it was a big success. It's GW2's turn to borrow their system: make fractals (effectively) infinitely scalable. T5, T6, T7, etc. With GW2's mechanics and how Fractals are designed, a straightforward scaling of mob hp and damage might not work the way it does in WoW, but I think this would be worth the effort of trying to figure out how to make it work out.

[Mourningcry.9428]

> @"Trevor Boyer.6524" said:

>

> 3. Argue all you want that "this won't stoke the fire of pve" but I have personally spoken with several other players/guilds with run pve content, particularly raids, with high level elitist attitude and these players ALL would absolutely love to see competitive leaderboards. **It was brought up in one discussion that this would actually encourage and give more purpose to streaming pve content and for people to watch it.** Unfortunately, these are the types of players who don't bother with coming into this forum unless they have some serious complaint. Oddly enough, I seem to only see negative buzz kill users who respond in this forum. It doesn't even matter how good an idea is, these users just post "no no no no no" with their ears plugged, because anything different is something they don't want. In fact, these users never actually contribute anything productive at all. The only they do is comment about how pissed off they are after Arenanet changes something, even if the change was good. Also, don't bother responding with "how we don't want more elitist attitude" after all the defense for elitism that I witnessed in this thread -> https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/24707/raid-elitism-happening-in-fractals/p1

 

Just as aside... how many of these players/guilds that you've spoken with can put up a legit sub 6min Arah P3 run?

 

Just asking because this is what the (restricted) benchmark was almost 2 years ago... Now I would imagine it'd be something closer to 5min with the power creep... And if I recall, there was a time were records were being taken down by sub-second differences.. that's how tight the competition was... that's the level of perfection these guilds were striving for.

 

It's not a matter of negative buzz kill, it's reality - there are very, very, very few players that can execute runs like that. You're suggesting the creation of a reward structure that all but the top tier of players would ever be able to conceivably have a shot at.

 

Awhile back there was a streamed Raid clear competition - as one would expect, it was dominated by the same tier of players. And while it did attract some degree of viewership, it was by no means the talk of the mainstream community. Further, with a permanent reward structure in place, there's even less incentive for these players to cast their runs as it would only expose their tactics and strategies...

 

Edit:

 

I quoted your third point, but should really have quoted the fourth as well, as I was thinking of both in my response - as noted by the Arah reference, and the exclusivity of the tiniest competitive faction of players.

 

[Feanor.2358]

> @"Trevor Boyer.6524" said:

> 1. Competitive scenes are the end game of any game. A given game's competitive scene being good or bad, will declare its longevity. Within the type of game genre we are discussing, this is true. It is also true with most genres of games, including stranger things like board games, card games, or childhood games like hide & go seek. The only time this is not true, is if we are talking something like Minecraft or The Sims, which is largely based around creative outlet. This is the difference between painting a picture or playing a game of Poker. The name of the game we are discussing is "Guild Wars 2". When purchasing such a game title, I would expect there to be plenty of competitive aspects concerning guilds vs. guilds, especially after having played its predecessor title, Guild Wars 1.

 

Competitive scenes are a form of endgame, but not the only one. And it is certainly not found in **any** game. There are plenty of cooperative games, both in video- and board-game markets, and no, they aren't based around creative outlet. Also talks about purchasing title are 5-6 years obsolete.

 

> @"Trevor Boyer.6524" said:

> 3. Argue all you want that "this won't stoke the fire of pve" but I have personally spoken with several other players/guilds with run pve content, particularly raids, with high level elitist attitude and these players ALL would absolutely love to see competitive leaderboards. **It was brought up in one discussion that this would actually encourage and give more purpose to streaming pve content and for people to watch it.** Unfortunately, these are the types of players who don't bother with coming into this forum unless they have some serious complaint. Oddly enough, I seem to only see negative buzz kill users who respond in this forum. It doesn't even matter how good an idea is, these users just post "no no no no no" with their ears plugged, because anything different is something they don't want. In fact, these users never actually contribute anything productive at all. The only they do is comment about how pissed off they are after Arenanet changes something, even if the change was good. Also, don't bother responding with "how we don't want more elitist attitude" after all the defense for elitism that I witnessed in this thread -> https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/24707/raid-elitism-happening-in-fractals/p1

 

Anecdotal evidence. And the thing is, you can find dozens of people for every one you spoke who will think differently by just venturing in the open world.

 

> @"Trevor Boyer.6524" said:

> 4. Players were not attracted to the HoT puzzle game leaderboards because the puzzle games are too short/small and become boring after you master them, not to mention the negligent rewards. Some of those games were a pain in the kitten to master and the only real incentive to ever complete them to begin with, was the mastery points. If you were to run leaderboards for 99CM 100CM, Raid CMS or even something like Arah Paths, with monthly rewards, you'd get a lot of participants and I'll guarantee that. Again, sit and argue all the reasons why you "no no no no no" this idea but I don't see how you can even begin to convince yourself that leaderboards/monthly rewards/guild recognition would somehow NOT draw in a much larger player base and purpose to the old content.

 

Or because the leaderboard thing is just not the kind of thing the PvE crowd cares about? I'd bet on that. The playerbase of this game is very casual.

 

> @"Trevor Boyer.6524" said:

> If competitive dungeons/fractals/raids were to happen, the game would feel a little bit more like Guild Wars.

 

Maybe. Maybe not. But keep in mind, GW2 is a MUCH more successful game than GW.

 

 

[GrubySzymek.1362]

> @"Trevor Boyer.6524" said:

> cut

 

Anet already tried to artificially create competitive scene with pvp esports and killed this mode in the process. I would be happy to see them doing the same for raids.

 

 

[GrubySzymek.1362]

> @"Kundry.1249" said:

> WoW borrowed heavily from GW2 Fractals for their Mythic+ system (scaling, affixes), and it was a big success. It's GW2's turn to borrow their system: make fractals (effectively) infinitely scalable. T5, T6, T7, etc. With GW2's mechanics and how Fractals are designed, a straightforward scaling of mob hp and damage might not work the way it does in WoW, but I think this would be worth the effort of trying to figure out how to make it work out.

 

I don't want fractals to become even more elitist cesspool raiders already turned them into. If you like the idea of infinity scaling instances, they should make them for raids so your minor part of community is out of semi-casual content that are fractals.

[Vinceman.4572]

> @"Trevor Boyer.6524" said:

 

> 5. This idea would not disturb general LFG play for dungeons/fractals/raids because the idea here is that a named guild team would be required to enter for these runs. So intrinsically, the only people doing this would be elite teams who are part of the same guild. This will not create more elitism within LFGs, it will actually reduce it. As this idea will draw the line between PUGing and a real reason to join a good guild who has elite teams, who don't need to PUG. There would be less elitism in the LFGs due to the elites playing with 5 man teams for speed clears, instead of PUGing in the LFG.

 

I doubt that it would create less elitism because a big bunch of players would drop out of the lfg pool and not be available to group with any longer. At the moment I see a lot of people from well-known guilds in my CM runs and that wouldn't be the case with such a system in the future. On the one hand the skill level of pugs would decrease tremendously and on the other hand people that want to clear difficult T4s or CMs outside of static guilds will increase their requirements to be safe that they'll get competent players.

[Kundry.1249]

> @"Kheldorn.5123" said:

> > @"Kundry.1249" said:

> > WoW borrowed heavily from GW2 Fractals for their Mythic+ system (scaling, affixes), and it was a big success. It's GW2's turn to borrow their system: make fractals (effectively) infinitely scalable. T5, T6, T7, etc. With GW2's mechanics and how Fractals are designed, a straightforward scaling of mob hp and damage might not work the way it does in WoW, but I think this would be worth the effort of trying to figure out how to make it work out.

>

> I don't want fractals to become even more elitist cesspool raiders already turned them into. If you like the idea of infinity scaling instances, they should make them for raids so your minor part of community is out of semi-casual content that are fractals.

 

You (and I) can stay in T4. Why would the existence of higher tiers make T4 any more elitist than it is (which it isn't)? If anything, the elitists will leave for higher tiers, leaving T4 more casual.

 

But at any rate, I should clarify: I didn't mean that T5+ to be the continuation of the existing system. They should be way harder (even compared to the CMs) and the reward system should be distinct from the existing dailies, meant only for the hardcore players.

 

Imagine top PvE players having challenging content to stream, like pushing a really high Fractal, inventing new strategies to make it in time.

[GrubySzymek.1362]

> @"Kundry.1249" said:

> > @"Kheldorn.5123" said:

> > > @"Kundry.1249" said:

> > > WoW borrowed heavily from GW2 Fractals for their Mythic+ system (scaling, affixes), and it was a big success. It's GW2's turn to borrow their system: make fractals (effectively) infinitely scalable. T5, T6, T7, etc. With GW2's mechanics and how Fractals are designed, a straightforward scaling of mob hp and damage might not work the way it does in WoW, but I think this would be worth the effort of trying to figure out how to make it work out.

> >

> > I don't want fractals to become even more elitist cesspool raiders already turned them into. If you like the idea of infinity scaling instances, they should make them for raids so your minor part of community is out of semi-casual content that are fractals.

>

> You (and I) can stay in T4. Why would the existence of higher tiers make T4 any more elitist than it is (which it isn't)? If anything, the elitists will leave for higher tiers, leaving T4 more casual.

>

> But at any rate, I should clarify: I didn't mean that T5+ to be the continuation of the existing system. They should be way harder (even compared to the CMs) and the reward system should be distinct from the existing dailies, meant only for the hardcore players.

>

> Imagine top PvE players having challenging content to stream, like pushing a really high Fractal, inventing new strategies to make it in time.

 

Players already have content to stream. But GW2 is a game nobody wants to watch.

[Lexi.1398]

I love leaderboards, i'm a very competitive person even if i'm still bad at the game (oops). I love the idea of leaderboards, infact the ONLY reason i play some games are to keep my spot on leaderboards.

 

However, I also see that PvE content is already full of elitism - and i've seen a lot of more casual games with players who specifically state they don't play WoW or whatever other game because of elitism and toxicity in high skill content (raids, etc). I think efforts to try and reduce elitism should be taken, but that's pretty difficult with a leaderboard around.

 

So I think...if any PvE leaderboard is to be introduced - do NOT show position on leaderboard unless in the top 10, top 50 or whatever. Don't discourage casual / or not-speedrun players like that, don't give people a platform to say "you're only 1600th? HAHA", don't give people a platform to see the rankings of PUGs (again, unless in that top few).

 

The idea of guild runs being whats recorded makes me worried that kill proof = guild membership, being as guilds dedicated to leaderboards would have exclusive membership which serves as kp...Though, i also see that if anyones as dedicated to leaderboards as me it's gonna shoot up the play time, possibly money spent on gw2 for those players striving for positions on it.

[Vinceman.4572]

> @"Lexi.1398" said:

> I love leaderboards, i'm a very competitive person even if i'm still bad at the game (oops). I love the idea of leaderboards, infact the ONLY reason i play some games are to keep my spot on leaderboards.

>

> However, I also see that PvE content is already full of elitism - and i've seen a lot of more casual games with players who specifically state they don't play WoW or whatever other game because of elitism and toxicity in high skill content (raids, etc). I think efforts to try and reduce elitism should be taken, but that's pretty difficult with a leaderboard around.

>

> So I think...if any PvE leaderboard is to be introduced - do NOT show position on leaderboard unless in the top 10, top 50 or whatever. Don't discourage casual / or not-speedrun players like that, don't give people a platform to say "you're only 1600th? HAHA", don't give people a platform to see the rankings of PUGs (again, unless in that top few).

>

> The idea of guild runs being whats recorded makes me worried that kill proof = guild membership, being as guilds dedicated to leaderboards would have exclusive membership which serves as kp...Though, i also see that if anyones as dedicated to leaderboards as me it's gonna shoot up the play time, possibly money spent on gw2 for those players striving for positions on it.

 

So, you want a leaderboard or not? Because if yes - and you want it to be like you stated - the leaderboard wouldn't be made for ya nor would you ever be in the range of top 10 or 50, probably not even top 250.

[Ultimatepwr.9562]

They recently said on reddit that they would never add Fractal Leaderboards, not because its hard, or it would take too much work, but because it is simply not healthy for the game to make this game types competitive side blatantly supported in game. So I think that answers a big question about whether anything like this would ever happen

[Kundry.1249]

> @"Kheldorn.5123" said:

> > @"Kundry.1249" said:

> > > @"Kheldorn.5123" said:

> > > > @"Kundry.1249" said:

> > > > WoW borrowed heavily from GW2 Fractals for their Mythic+ system (scaling, affixes), and it was a big success. It's GW2's turn to borrow their system: make fractals (effectively) infinitely scalable. T5, T6, T7, etc. With GW2's mechanics and how Fractals are designed, a straightforward scaling of mob hp and damage might not work the way it does in WoW, but I think this would be worth the effort of trying to figure out how to make it work out.

> > >

> > > I don't want fractals to become even more elitist cesspool raiders already turned them into. If you like the idea of infinity scaling instances, they should make them for raids so your minor part of community is out of semi-casual content that are fractals.

> >

> > You (and I) can stay in T4. Why would the existence of higher tiers make T4 any more elitist than it is (which it isn't)? If anything, the elitists will leave for higher tiers, leaving T4 more casual.

> >

> > But at any rate, I should clarify: I didn't mean that T5+ to be the continuation of the existing system. They should be way harder (even compared to the CMs) and the reward system should be distinct from the existing dailies, meant only for the hardcore players.

> >

> > Imagine top PvE players having challenging content to stream, like pushing a really high Fractal, inventing new strategies to make it in time.

>

> Players already have content to stream. But GW2 is a game nobody wants to watch.

 

If nobody wants to watch GW2, then clearly there is nothing worth streaming in the game.