Zephire.8049

The whole thing reminds me a lot of the Josh Strife Hayes video about forced player interaction. The TLDR is different people have different playstyles and different expectations for content, which is fine, but when games force people with opposite playstyles/expectations together it just makes all players unhappy because either they have to do something they don't enjoy, have to interact with people they don't like, or both.

Longer than 20 minutes? Sure. DS is about 40 these days for the whole run. 2 hours is a lot longer than 20 minutes, though, and you can't say it's optional to do the DE meta when several achievements require you to beat the meta. The turtle was just one aspect that was the most visible (both literally and because of the heavy marketing). Open world is more than just map comp. If people didn't mind spending 2 hours waiting around getting the perfect group together, raids would be a heck of a lot more popular than they are.

Also how many people are repeating it, especially now. Because, anecdotally, I know no one who wants to do the meta again after beating it once just to see it done (or get the turtle pre-merchant). The only people I see running it repeatedly are people in hardcore guilds (who may or may not be getting paid to run it) and a handful of people on this forum who say they're doing so. Everyone else nopes out of there because it's not fun and/or feasible for most open world players. If content designed to be repeated often doesn't retain, say, 95% of people who do it that heavily implies there's a problem with the content. A 5% retention rate is horrible and retention of longer-term/invested players is just as important as new player retention. And that's not even getting into the social issues and toxicity this meta brings out.

I take a break only to come back and find this unpinned so I guess we can assume the "nerfs" to the fight and "buffs" to the loot are all that's going to happen. Can't say I'm impressed. So many of us want this meta to be fun and a success, not gated off until it joins the PoF metas to not be done unless a guild deigns to organize a run so the average player can do it. One of the reasons the HoT metas are done to this day is because a map can organize amongst itself as long as 2-4 people know what they're doing. Another is there's still a good chance at success provided those 2-4 people can herd cats and half the people doing the meta can read chat—even trolls are a minor (if annoying) issue because the map population cap is high enough to compensate for that. Plus they're fast and the loot is good. With DE? You need to use LFG (something the game never teaches you how to use) and hope to get in a map that's both organized and doesn't have a handful of people on it who aren't going to participate because there's very, very little leeway due to the small population cap. All so you can spend a couple hours on it for a chance at ~15g of generic loot. This whole debacle really killed my interest in the game. I couldn't even get excited over the recent news of LW1 and another expansion because if DE is the type of content the studio's interested in putting out now, it's not for me. I'm an adult and don't need to be told to "try out" content I've tried and don't particularly like (especially if it's forced) and I'm not interested in putting 2+ hours into something that's reliant on multiple levels of luck to have a ~15% chance of succeeding. The fight itself is cool but everything else is hardly "epic", particularly the lack of communication.

If they don't want people to use mounts (or not use mounts until you get your regional flying license) they should design maps that can be walked in. EoD maps are far too large and far too vertical for doing them without mounts to be enjoyable. If an entire expansion is treated like a jumping puzzle (meaning no mounts/flying mounts and you have to figure out how to get places) it ceases to be fun if it's work and waypoints are few and far between. For EoD in particular, they would need to make ziplines far more visible with their direction shown and, preferably, show on the minimap. Heck, that would help reduce the number of people relying on the skyscale simply because finding ziplines can take you out of the way and it's faster and more reliable to fly up than check everywhere around you. Also... people paid for mount skins and want to see them. Most mounts in WoW could be acquired in-game. In GW2, every mount skin but one for the WvW mount means someone somewhere bought gems. If someone spends $5, $10, $25+ for a mount skin in addition to spending days/weeks doing a collection to get the base mount, they won't be too keen on being told all that's locked away until they put a dozen or more hours into a story. They may even decide not to buy the content if they can't use what they've paid to get.

Considering that collection isn't even available until after you beat the story and thus the biggest spoiler isn't a spoiler at all, it really should be available regardless of the state of the meta. I can see what they're going for but either have main character backstory accessible or have the meta it requires be accessible, don't have main character info (especially info they low-key hyped up) locked behind a meta that's largely inaccessible to your average player, especially as you only have 15 minutes on a completed map before being booted (and completing this quest will boot you anyway).

The Foefire pants are a really good example of this. They're a gemstore item and quite recent so it's reasonable to assume they have the latest available tech put into them and have had time spent on them so they look good so the company makes more money. The heavy and light skins have the various strips of leather but the medium one is basically booty shorts with some glowing due to how badly they would clip with medium chest armour. Which of course means the heavy and light chest are minimal but the medium chest comes with a belt that looks like there was a wrestling championship match in the Final Fantasy universe. If they aren't even future-proofing gemstore skins to work with a mix-and-match armour weight system, that's not even close to being a priority rework even if it would be nice for players to have.

Oof thinking a continuous two hour time block isn't an impediment to people who are busy and/or have families who would be drawn to a game that has horizontal progression and has always billed itself as the MMO for busy people. The western world is set up so there's all of 8 hours of "leisure" time. Except everything comes out of that time (or from sleep time). Commutes, meal prep, errands, bills, social activities, family time, studying, etc. all have to fit in there. Having 2 hours of actually free, uninterrupted time is a rarity, especially for people with families. If something—anything—wants to have no small chunk of time dedicated to it when it's not essential, it needs to prove it's worth it. This meta doesn't even produce the happy brain juice despite taking up as much time as a feature length movie and woe be to you if you want to do anything else in the game as you can't even leave the map if you decide you want to do the meta.

I rate it HoT > PoF > EoD HoT had interesting maps, the story was fine, the metas were challenging but doable and fun. It's also improved with age via the mounts and power creep. PoF brought mounts and the story was also fine but leaned too human-centric for my personal taste (especially after LW3). The maps were kind of same-y, though, without much replay value. Plus those hearts take forever to fill up. The metas being ignored until they were effectively dead didn't help matters. EoD is pretty and there's some nice QoL aspects of it (commune HPs, ability to buy from heart vendors without doing the heart, hearts that don't take forever to do) but it's also the only expansion where I have had a visceral negative reaction toward and burnt out on in less than two weeks. It just seems it caters to the players the current devs wish they had rather than the players past devs built the game for (and who still populate the game).

I haven't tried it (not a banner warrior main) but the banners have a long range before they despawn yet if you forget to pick them up and use a zipline you're looking at a 70 second cooldown on them. Which is a pretty big deal in strikes and in metas where you use ziplines a lot because the fight moves around and a banner warrior that can't use banners ends up bringing the rest of the group down. I can't imagine trying to banner on the Kaineng strike, especially if your group ziplines up to the sniper. It just seems like a huge oversight that ziplines forcibly despawn summons and puts them on cooldown rather than "pausing" them like using a mount does.

Can't speak for mechanist but ziplines forcibly unmerge soulbeasts and put the merge on cooldown. It's not as egregious as necro minions or ranger spirits but still really annoying, especially on the Kaineng strike. Ziplines also remove warrior banners and put them on full cooldown if the warrior doesn't remember to pick them up first.

The metas are fun the first two or three times but after that the enjoyment drops off, at least for me. There's a lot going on, it's a time commitment that can range from 20 minutes to 2 hours, and the loot isn't something to write home about. They are well-made for the most part but with so much going on you it gets a bit overwhelming. They're much more the sort of events you do once a week instead of events you run daily. Yeah, sadly there's a lot of RNG and repetition this expansion. The DE meta for sure but fishing is also RNG, you don't always get elite specialization items from completed metas (unsure if this is a bug or not but hasn't been mentioned to be a bug), and the only way to get the level 3 chips for your jade bot is for them to drop for you as they're untradeable and you can't craft them. They aren't needed but if you really like a chip and want to max it out, you'll have to grind an encounter until the upgraded chip drops. And same. Another non-meta event that's supposed to be big is the Leviathan events that require probably at least 7 or 8 people with a certain mastery level in skiffs to complete. It's impossible to do with a handful of people and/or if people don't have the right mastery level so a lot of the time it's completely ignored. There's also a maze dungeon that you need at least two people to do (more if it's not a raid healer and raid tank). Group events have been in the game since release, it just feels particularly forced this time since group events are made so you can't even attempt to do them solo (or will quickly kill people who attempt to solo them), at least the ones I've come across. Glad to have helped!

There's a weird dichotomy in EoD. Parts of it are player friendly so you have story missions that teach mechanics and let you take a power boost if you want to zip through it (it will disqualify you from achievements that run, though), nearly all hero points are commune, there's better audio cues for letting you know what's going on and what to do, and you can buy items from heart vendors without having to do the heart first. Just some good ol' quality of life improvements people have been asking for for years. But then there are the strikes and metas. The metas are interesting but they all have split mechanics similar to Triple Trouble where, if one split fails, the whole meta fails and there needs to be organization and communication to do them. They also suffer from having too much going on during the fight. The strikes are interesting but some of them feel like HP sponges where the fight is being dragged out specifically so that there's more of a chance that a player will mess up and the boss can one-shot them. It's both better than PoF but worse at the same time. I'm guessing the one event you mention is DE, which is... polarizing, to say the least. It's definitely the most extreme example of forcing players into groups for hard content but the idea behind it (that casual players just need a chance to do hard content and they'll like it and hardcore players will be happy to have casuals forced on them) weaves itself throughout the metas to one degree or another. There's also heavy RNG aspects in the game which you may or may not like, depending on how you feel about RNG in general. If you're fine waiting, it wouldn't hurt to wait until the next patch in a couple weeks at least, just to get an idea of what Anet wants to do because they've dug in about how DE is how they want it and nerfed one of the new elite specs egregiously. But they also added points of interest to the new hub because people were missing locations. The best way I can sum it up is that it feels like there's an internal struggle on with who the game should cater to—casuals or hardcore players—and we don't know which side has the most sway yet.

Oh for sure. And a game that pushes the cash shop while catering to veteran players (AKA people most invested in the game) has signaled it's planning (or already entered) maintenance mode, especially when it's an MMO. Between questionable design choices for the health of the game and pushing the cash shop (which is already tied to the trading post so players can't not see it if they use the TP), it feels like we're on the precipice with just the right amount of plausible deniability for it to go either way. And if by chance it is a bug, they could at least say it because silence doesn't help this type of thing.

Another thing I noticed is that on my alt accounts, which don't have EoD, every time I log into them there's a large, animated icon telling me EoD is out now and to buy it. I close them but they always pop up the next time I log into them and PoF never did this from what I remember. It's getting kind of obnoxious, to be honest, and if I was a new player in a game this pushy bug or no bug I'd simply move on. Between that and the cash shop icon being lit up for the past two weeks and no mention of it being bugged, it feels like they're really pushing spending money on the game since one or the other being bugged could potentially be understandable but both of them being bugged at the same time seems unlikely.

Also no mention of the turtle merchant despite the delay in the second half of patch notes. It's strange and feels like the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing and the feet are doing their own thing oblivious to what either of the the hands are doing.

I said the rewards are a side issue, not a non-issue. Yes there needs to be some decent reward/reward structure in place to keep people playing it but the priority issue right now should be how many people do not enjoy the meta, burnt out on the meta, refuse to do the meta, or don't have the time to do the meta. You can have the biggest, shiniest reward there is but if people hate what they have to do to get it, they aren't going to do it, especially if it's like how it is now where the people running it for personal gain are being gatekeepers and will change map instances at the last minute to shake off anyone who wasn't in the squad. For an open world meta that Anet expects people to run regularly for years. Experienced players are good—and can even carry metas—but you cannot pay experienced players to come back to content they hate unless you make it so they don't hate the experience or pay enough to bribe them to come back. Easing up on mechanics (there have been a lot of suggestions in this thread about ways to go about it without taking away from the "epicness" of the fight) benefits everyone because those experienced/hardcore players need less experienced/casual players to populate the map and keep it going while the latter group benefits from the experience of the former group and will have a higher chance of success because of them which will lead to more positive experiences with the meta as a whole. By both groups.

5g for the escorts finishing, 5g for the crystals finishing, and 40-50g for the meta finishing. Make it a weekly thing if needed and it can be a high risk/high reward situation, but no one's going to do this for a small chance at 20g (which is quickly dropping lower as the bulk of that is the ancient summoning stone). The rewards are a side issue, anyway. The main problem is with the encounter itself, not shinies (or lack thereof) at the end. Temporarily increasing loot slightly is a bandaid and it won't fix the issue of player retention or population on maps both interested in doing the meta and skilled/organized enough to have a chance at beating it. Anet seems to have decided jingling keys in front of players will be enough of a distraction from everything else so they don't have to change the meta more than they already have (or worse, admit they were wrong if it's an ego thing).

Looks like they're sticking with the "Working as intended" excuse just like how they dug in their heels about the PoF metas being fine (and look at what happened with those). Memories of Aurene have already dropped to 44s/each from 50s/each in ~2 hours and Antique Summoning Stones have dropped from 17g to 13g since the patch and both of those were the "added rewards" they thought would bring people back to the meta. For a two hour meta. Where you get nothing if it fails.

I really can't believe the buff in rewards was some extra items that are crashing and already at 50s (with even more metas dropping them now, too). No one is going to do this meta for so little. I've seen screenshots of a daily meta chest select reward that included an antique stone and that might be enough for another week or two but the prices for those are dropping quickly as supply starts meeting demand, too. They also don't solve the problem that is the hour+ leading up to the meta is unrewarding and people don't want to stick around for 2 hours for a low chance at 20g when they could hit up several different metas in that time, do T4s, clear a raid wing or two, or do Silverwastes or Drizzlewood for guaranteed gold. You can either have hard content that's rewarding or you can have easy content that's less rewarding, you can't have hard content that's unrewarding unless you want said content to be dead. This is PoF metas all over again.

To answer your question, yes EoD metas are both hard and short on time. Maybe someone could have ressed you but if you died at any point before the lane champ was killed, there was no time to res you. There's also so many mobs in EoD metas that people are reluctant to res because that will put them in combat (which will also slow the res down) and force them to either kill a mob that could be upscaled or run far enough away they can mount up and rejoin the meta. Or they'll die trying to res you. If you're dead, you're already one person short for the meta and it's unfair to everyone else to want it to be 2-5 people short on the meta when a lot of metas succeed with less than a minute on the clock (at least from my experience). Plus, due to the split mechanics, you need as many bodies to throw at events as you can get, especially for events that, should they fail, the whole meta will fail. I don't agree with the lack of downtime or breathing room in EoD metas but it is what it is. If it's after the final boss, yes people should res you. If it's during the meta—and especially if there's enemies around—just WP and run back because it's unsafe to res you and the entire group is on a strict timer.

Thought it was just me. Maybe it has something to do with the March sales? Though it would be preferable to have it light up once a day to show there's a new sale and have the icon go back to normal instead of standing out like how it is and it not even fading during cutscenes. It's kind of hard to take an emotional moment seriously when the cash shop icon is lit up.

I did the same since the writing was on the wall after Anet said they were fine with it catering to raiders. Knocked out the achievements ASAP while it was popular because who knew how active it would be in the future. I actually forget it exists because it was so forgetful. Maybe people who played season 1 have some nostalgia for it but without rewards and no one talking about it anymore, it blends in with everything else. Anet hyped it up a lot, too. But when told it was too difficult and the rewards too meager to appeal to casual players, they said they were fine with that and it was supposed to be hard(er) content. (Sounds kind of familiar, eh?) The last time I saw anyone mention it was a month or two after it released. And with Eye of the North no longer being the main hub as we've moved on from IBS, there's not even an indicator it's starting on the minimap anymore.

Just an FYI, there's no voiced dialogue for those ones so it goes faster but you'll get a prompt for the last one (after you get the three locked behind the meta) and that one will take you to a different instance. Don't do the last step unless you're done with other achievements because you lose the post-meta map when you do. I also suggest looking on the wiki for her locations ahead of time. All the others I did on my own but 15 minutes (less with travel time) is not a lot to search for her, especially with other achievements to do.

Normally I go for the specialization achievements quickly (skins + ascended weapons = good) but have no plan on that this time. I liked the story well enough but cannot imagine doing it 8 more times, especially on classes I don't like. One, maybe two, others for easier story achievements but I'm not going to spend 9 x ~12 = 108 hours on it. I already spent about 50 hours on DE trying to win one time (and the goggles bugged out =/ ), I'm not spending another hundred plus hours on grinding out content I have no interest in. I actually wonder if Anet is recording and reporting on the "engagement" of players by putting in such grinds as this sort of thing is a tactic used in shady and predatory games as a way to pump up numbers while burning players out. The story's fine but attempting to force people to repeat it 8 more times is extreme and will only turn players off of both the story and the game. I never thought I'd say this but I prefer the DRM grind because it was faster. So much faster.