Erise.5614

Am I overlooking something or are you talking about less than a handful of groups here while the overall participation took an extremely steep nosedive. As far as I can tell (on EU) there's Soo Lost, DBS, FG/End, HS irregularly, some larger guilds maybe once a week and maybe one or two smaller groups without active recruiting doing it. Who are all doing magnificently and are lovely people! But I'd wager there's more guild recruiting and community interaction happening on AB in a day than on DE in a week. It's awesome you found an environment where you enjoy your time there. But it really does not seem reflective of the general player base.

The system is very confusing from the outside. But basically, your fractal level doesn't matter. So long as anyone in the group can start the map, you can play it. Even if it's above your fractal level. The only thing that matters is whether you have enough agony resistance (otherwise you will basically just die). Which can only be slotted into ascended gear. And that takes a while to farm / quite some gold to craft. Fractals are basically more involved dungeons, strikes are more involved fractals (without the gear requirements of fractals).

When it comes down to it. Rewards in games are an excuse to keep having fun. Game developers can use it to encourage diversity. Which in turn makes individual pieces of content less likely to get stale. And players can use it as a guide for what to do when they just want to have fun and wonder what they should do next. Which means in reality it's a balance. Players won't play the most rewarding content in the game if they don't enjoy it. They'll gladly settle for something slightly less rewarding. And similarly, players will avoid their favorite content if it's unrewarding and settle for something they enjoy slightly less if the rewards are much better. The moment you exclusively play because of rewards and not because you enjoy playing is the moment the hobby turned into an addiction.

Since people get so hung up at that phrasing, I've changed it. I did not mean to refer to any specific skill or investment into the mode. The point is that even just this very low bar of having had one character be in a raid instance when an encounter was completed makes you part of a rather small minority... except on DE today. There we know for sure that it merely makes you a bit above average and likely just average. The point is the steep discrepancy between the general player population and the population completing DE. Whether this style of content can be sustained when catering to such a niche. And how the rather hostile rift between the audience who enjoys that content and those who were frustrated by it can be avoided in the future.

Spending significant amounts of development effort on content only (conservatively) <10% of the player base will enjoy is not sustainable. New players learning the game is just fine. But if the majority never reaches that place then more development time and effort has to be spent at keeping them engaged and adding educational tools for them. Side note. This is why I think Strikes are a fantastic concept. Built for a small hardcore audience first but made accessible to everyone in a first story iteration and then made accessible to a significant amount of players in the normal mode. A model that I believe can be successful at serving the different audiences with a justifiable amount of development time. A misunderstanding indeed! I'm saying a large number of inexperienced players are lead to attempt the meta. While the people succeeding are extremely veteran. Putting 1 and 1 together, what I'm saying here is: the inexperienced players are responsible for most failures in the statistic and have mostly left DE as a result. Leaving it as one of the least played metas just a few months after release. Just a step above Serpents Ire. And three steps below Saitung, Gerent or AB. Of course any player can convert to such a veteran. But very few do. So ANet has to deal with that fact somehow. Yes. Exactly. Not using any judgement or anything. It means they succeeded at playing a raid. Maybe they had a friend to carry them through one of the easy parts. Maybe they participated in a training. Who knows. But we know for a fact that they have experienced raiding. And just that fact alone relegates them to a minority.

Timers exist in several places. But the question is why and how they fail. What poses the challenge, how do players overcome the challenge and under what circumstances do they run out of time. With DE it's about 90% based on DPS and maybe 10% on reacting, moving right, etc. None of the events you listed really fail because a full map does everything right except having set up their character correctly before joining the map. There is this perspective. That players got away without becoming high performers for too long and that OW needs to ramp up. That putting up barriers is the best way to get people to learn and to improve. That it leads to awesome communities, fun content and in more players populating the hardcore endgame. That DE is a positive development that's pushing players, pushing community and resulting in lots of cool dynamics. On the forums, in the game and shared by some of the influencers. All of this is a valid opinion to hold. But it's fundamentally built around the belief that high performance is the one and ultimate goal of everyone. That the only reason to play is to maximize efficiency. And that it would be better to have people be driven away than to let them get away with not improving. While overlooking that this is exactly what has happened in the past. That this is exactly the reason they don't get as many content updates as they'd like. That ANet is pushing the game hard into "their" direction and that it simply failed yet again. Populations are tiny compared to almost all of OW. Despite it being the newest content. There's no way to argue this away. It's fantastic that you love it but it's a big issue when we look forward into GW2s future. Will ANet keep focusing on such a tiny part of the community? And it really is tiny. I've started manually keeping track of achievement scores and mastery levels on my DE runs. Clicking on every single profile image and writing it down. Mean AS is 26k. Mean mastery is above 400. More than 30% of players in my last two runs had above 447 mastery points. Which is significant because it identifies them as someone who completed a raid encounter. The meta is primarily (successfully) completed by groups made up to a majority of veterans. A lot of which with experience in hardcore content. This is not sustainable. The thread is a perfect representation of the reality in the game. It seems a ton of players. Especially players in the medium to low range. Are sick of Dragon's End. This is a reality we face. Doesn't matter who's fault it is. If it's laziness, unwillingness to read, learn, skipping tutorials. None of that matters. That is what happens. So what would be constructive ways out of this? To attract and retain not just veterans but the general player population? Without making it a snore fest for high performance players like it is often complained about when referring to OW? What exactly are the properties you enjoy about it? How can those be retained without antagonizing the majority? Or is there just no way to do that? And ANet should create content accordingly? Split by target audience? Where each audience receives developer attention proportional to its size and buying power?

Right now I am genuinely trying to understand what it is you enjoy. To make double sure I'm not putting words in your mouth. So, you find the mechanics more challenging and therefore more interesting. This is a perfectly valid perspective. Though I do struggle a bit with the word mechanics here. This can refer to anything happening in the game. If you could point out what mechanics exactly. And I really don't mean that you have to justify why you like them. Nor be hyper specific about which aspect. The kind of answer I'm looking for is "I like how the minibosses work", "an open world meta that requires killing specific adds (thornhearts) makes the fight all the more interesting to me" or "I like how we have to make sub groups and organize around support boons". Just a short list of what exactly you refer to when you say "mechanics" here. Similar deal as above. I really just want to make triple sure I understand what exactly you mean. What is the satisfying thing about this in your opinion? Do you feel like you are improving? Is it a sense of pride in having beaten it that makes it more satisfying to you? Would two or generally multiple losses in a row further improve that satisfaction? Would it be satisfying regardless of how high the win rate of others is, so long as you personally loose regularly?

Apologies if this seems obvious to you. But I want to make sure to not misunderstand everything. What exactly do you find challenging about the encounter? And how should I understand the last sentence? Are you saying you enjoy the meta because you sometimes fail it? But isn't that fear justified? If you do try to participate as short as possible, would that not seriously affect your win rate or at least when and how often you get to attempt the meta? The reason I call it a DPS check is because it does require above average OW DPS performance. You can see a direct correlation between DPS during the first phase and whether the meta succeeds or fails. Like, it's basically a 1:1 correlation.

I never said they are unskippable. I said the event is not portrayed as optional side content. Your point that DE is not mainline content but rather an irrelevant, optional side activity is a really weird hill to die on. And that's not an answer to my questions. So to keep it on topic for the thread. I would like to ask an open question to anyone who enjoys or loves DE. What core experience is it that you enjoy about Dragon's End? In what specific ways does it relate to the long duration? Does it also relate to the "low" DPS check and to the integration of reward structures (turtle, story achievement, etc.)? And should lots of players who are not experienced dealing the necessary DPS end up in Dragon's End?

For example, not almost two hours of necessary pre events that do have usual OW difficulty. Or not implementing many of the standard OW content into the map (e.g. there's no fishing holes in DS either). Or giving it a different name and explaining the step up in promotional material (random example: Legendary event). Or adding a DPS check at the very beginning of the event. Or even at the beginning of the map. Locking it off to some degree and adjusting the design around it to not expect participation or completion for the locked parts of the event. Yes. Obviously the game is to blame for player expectations. It built those up for about a decade. Ending up with a game that's solid enough to keep attracting audiences in times where most of the competitors from back in the day keep declining. Though I do understand that both you and Yoni do prefer to blame players for their expectations and generally how they play the game. Despite the very obvious issues that many players have, you don't even consider that maybe other perspectives are valid too and that there could be ways forward where future events of this kind can be implemented in a way that doesn't cause these negative experiences, that cause less negativity, less toxicity without taking away your from fun. On that note. I still don't quite understand what exactly it is you two love about the event. What core experience is it that both of you enjoy? And in what specific ways does it relate to the long duration, the "low" DPS check and to the integration of reward structures (turtle, story achievement, etc.)? Is having large amounts of inexperienced players attempt the event part of your enjoyment?

By those definitions, every meta is optional side content. Which can be your opinion and is fine as that. But it still has the problem that it doesn't set itself apart from the rest, having people join with false expectations and (judging by the response to the event) quite a lot having worse experiences than necessary.

There's a steep difference between having a block of a few hours at a time of free time and spending a few hours of it playing a single piece of content. Or spending several hours of it playing anything at all. There's other things to do with free time. For example, watching a movie or going out to a nice dinner. As mentioned a few times in this thread. It's valid to have some variance and have some longer content. Or to have more difficult content. But DE is not built to be this kind of optional side content that's only meant for medium to high performance players with a lot of time. There's too many critical paths leading into it from content that traditionally accommodated more limited playing time and lower performance. Whether it be due to not being able to or just not wanting to spend that much time on the game at once. DE doesn't set itself apart in any meaningful way while being designed for a different target audience.

You and others keep suggesting that DE is optional hardcore content. That it can easily be avoided and is therefore more like instanced content. "Don't like, don't play." Which is a bad point to make for two reasons. As I keep explaining, it's not designed to be optional content. Several critical paths lead straight into it. Several of which being non high performance players. Different than in the past, very much including the critical path of the personal story. And also different than in the past it requires a higher DPS benchmark of the map. The combination of leading more different players into the map and ramping up is what's bad about it. The turtle attached to it. The acquisition for the turtle, the story and all the other stuff is not a problem if the event is easy. If it can be completed reasonably and consistently be beaten within two attempts or so. And a hard meta is not a problem if none of those things factor in. If it's just rewarding a more mats per hour than you can get elsewhere too. But having no exclusive features locked behind it and having no achievements from other areas of gameplay tied to it. Nor should achievement hunting have any impact on the meta, if the map offers any.

This is such a good point. The game started out with the premise that players should always be happy to see another player. Well, in reality it wasn't always being happy about it. But in OW it at least used to never be a feeling of "oh no. Another player. This will be bad". In DE and with the design philosophy behind it, it very much is bad to have certain players in your map. You want very specific compositions and primarily a specific target audience on your map. Or you'll fail. The opposite of what GW2 was originally aiming for. Of what I love GW2 for. Stuff for different players is fine. Additional modes and kinds of content for others is fine. But please no at the cost of abandoning this design philosophy for core OW content.

Oh absolutely! I don't expect you to do anything and not all content being for all players is absolutely fair! For example, raids are fine! They were advertised and due to the name also assumed as hardcore content so everyone can make an educated decision about whether or not that content is for them. Different kinds of content are fine too! But please. No expansion features locked behind it. If it's not accessible and not explicitly labeled hardcore content then don't advertise it. Especially not as main feature with graphics and its own web page, it's own merchandise and all that jazz. And if it's not meant for all players, don't have the personal story lead into the event. It's not a problem that DE exists. The problem is how DE exists. Either it needs to differentiate itself and not pull players as strongly for several kinds of critical paths that have nothing to do with high combat performance. Or it needs to be in line with other meta events that are possible to accomplish for groups of such players.

Oh yes. I've very much seen that too! The question is how they got their Writs of Dragon's End. Did they do daily conversions for 22 days? Did they farm pre events for 15 hours? Or did they fail the meta like 3 times? I'm saying, most people I have talked to have failed the meta a few times and got their Writs that way. The merchant is a way to assure they will get it after a certain amount of failures more so than a way to avoid the event entirely. After all, it's not like people who just enter the map would know they are underequipped and should avoid it.

A pity system is a common game design term popularized by the 2012 Diablo 3 which used a random gear drop system. But making sure there can not be negative extremes by providing a guaranteed legendary item after a certain amount of bad luck draws. The system is taking pity on people who have worse luck than intended. Basically, a pity system just means you are guaranteed to get the reward you are looking for... eventually. Still hard yes. If I see promotional material with a BigMac, purchase whatever is promoted and then don't get a BigMac. That is literally false advertising and very much illegal. It's hard because players don't play coordinated and don't react quickly enough. Though, make no mistake. The vast majority of them still succeed. Even if they struggle. Experienced players with the DPS I mentioned will have no problem clearing the event. On DE. A map of experienced players with that DPS is guaranteed to fail. Whereas a map full of players who never tried to beat the meta but who deal high DPS (let's say 15k). They will have zero issue succeeding on their first try. Your comparison is wrong and so is your math. Percentage calculations are not commutative. X + 25% = Y is not Y - 25% = X. The number you were trying to calculate is 7.2k. And you only need 2-5 players per lane to have that performance. So only the top 6 - 15 players need that performance. Average map DPS can be somewhere around 4-5k. And if the center players aren't up to par you can send a few more to fix that problem and still succeed within the time limit. Not seen that happen in years but there you go. You can still fail by failing mechanics. But it's a real challenge to fail due to lack of DPS. I mean. DE's split would be minibosses, no? Greens are just a spectacle gimmick. But anyway. DS is just more punishing on a personal level in this regard. You have the freedom to fail, die and get back to the group several times without seriously affecting the chances to win. Again. It's the reverse of DE. DE has less demanding and less involved mechanics than several other meta events. It just needs more DPS than any before. By quite a margin.

I am aware that various map specific achievements exist. Which is why I specifically called out story achievements. Pulling people exactly while they are doing story to do the event. DS had nothing comparable. Those achievements are more comparable to the water dragon cape and its associated collection. Not to "True Ending".

Because it's still directly related to participation. In the case of the turtle, expecting repeated participation if you failed. Which is still a tremendous waste of time and a very bad experience. Yeah, I'm really not getting that definition. Like, sure. Some of them work that way. But I did say it acts more like a pity system. There is a cost, but that cost isn't gold. It's a mat you must farm or convert into. So probably playing the event several times. And since one still needs to buy the egg it means having failed the event several times. So let's agree on calling it a pity system with extra steps. It may not be exactly your definition of a pity system. But it is designed as a fallback for repeated failure more so than as a convenient way to circumvent the meta entirely. The meta is very much designed as the most central piece of content in the expansion. You do understand that everyone did pay money for the expansion, right? When I go to McDonals, see a promotion for a BigMac, pay for the BigMac. Then yeah. I very much do expect to have access to a BigMac within a reasonable amount of time. In combination, those two sentences are weird. Saying it's harder than I made it out to be while saying my statement is wrong because it's harder than I claim? DS has a lower DPS requirement than DE. That doesn't make it a walk in the park. But you don't need as much raw output. As few as 3 high DPS players can do it without too much of a hassle. Or equivalents of less knowledgeable players. It's really not comparable with DE which needs somewhere around 9k average during the moments you can attack. And my personal record for lowest average phase DPS is 12.2k. A DS map can still succeed with somewhere around 6k - 8k map average. If the players who move in the center have some experience and coordination is half way decent. Maps struggle because of a lack of experience. Specifically with surviving in the center arena while fighting the pod bosses. But DPS requirements are very manageable to overcome. If you keep your DPS uptime high it's very possible even at relatively low DPS numbers. Which is different to DE in a lot of ways. Surviving is easier and therefore DPS potential more important than DPS uptime. As it's quite high by default.

You can get a legendary ring as well. There's a 1:1 conversion for legendary divinations. Though if you play all raid wings you'll probably not need those anymore by the time you have excess LI. (Which is 42 weeks of clearing all 4 HoT raid wings or 33 weeks of clearing all raids and all HoT strikes) Yeah. Another use for LI could be nice. Though an infinite one would be better. Regardless of what they add, hardcore raiders will run out of rewards yet again before soon. Something infinite could be more useful. Like converting it directly to gold by making them tradable or indirectly by allowing their conversion into a tradable mat.

It doesn't need to be successful but you must fight Soo Won. Again. Turtle was originally locked behind success and is still very much expecting anyone to play DE. Deliberate avoidance is convoluted and even with continuous failure you're faster farming DE than going the other route. In practice, the vendor is a pity system. Not something that will be used by a significant amount of players to avoid the DE meta. Especially not those who would be served best if they were not lured in with false expectations. Oh, no doubt. But that's because guilds have mostly abandoned it. It's mostly pure PUGs with 3 random commanders. None of those guilds who join with 30% of the max players and call it a pug. I didn't check the precise number recently but it's somewhere between 50%-70% the requirements of DE and only really needed of like 15 people.

DS was not directly integrated into the personal story. It was not integrated into personal story achievements, it did not unlock any of the expansion features. So, no. There is some overlap. But there were fewer in DS. Most notably, people who just followed typically very achievable OW / Story content were not lead directly into it. Only players looking for unique stats, a new rune or legendary items. Only experienced players. Also, the DPS check is higher in DE, even adjusted for power creep and even when accounting for the map buffs. Which is why DS was more reasonable to learn while DE will remain in its current state of popularity or lower long term.

I'm currently not complaining about the acquisition method. I'm making a point about how ANet very deliberately designed the expansion in such a way that the vast majority would be drawn into DE because all different kinds of progression systems lead directly into it. Story, OW achievements, story achievements, specialization collections, turtle, legendaries. The only people not very directly lead into DE are PvP/WvW and instanced content players. Pretty much everyone else has DE participation in the critical path. Edit: Which, combined with the fact that they expected average groups to fail, is not a great idea in my humble opinion.

Truly a mystery how anyone could think the turtle was a big part of the expansion.

The vendor always existed at both locations. The entrance and the end. But looking up the old pages on the wiki, I did indeed remember that one incorrectly as the entry one only sold machetes until April 2016. My bad! So what was leading players into DS were specialization collections, rune of leadership and Gen 2 legendaries. Still quite a far cry from all the aspects of the EoD expansion that lead you into DE. As DS notably had a much stronger lure for hardcore players and little use for non hardcore players. DE is almost the opposite. You get plenty of progress towards your legendary from outside of the event while most non hardcore systems lead you into it.