Observations regarding difficulty and skill differences

[Erise.5614]

The release and recent controversy regarding difficulty of a meta map have spawned a lot of discussion about how to improve as a player and the difficulty of the game in general.

I want to bring up a few opinions and observations for things I noticed contributing to it. Unfortunately, some of them are really fundamental without simple fixes. 

1. Feedback about what is happening is not ideal
   Understanding how well you do, how different choices you make affect your healing, boons or DPS is extremely difficult.
   The buff bar is used to extreme amounts. Often relegating information to tiny icons you have to hover over.
   The difference between hit box (the thing you can attack), hit marker (the thing that spawns damage numbers) and enemy animations (the thing that looks like it can be attacked) are not obvious and have been getting detached from one another more and more in recent years. 
   All of those make it much harder to understand what is happening, let alone understand your place within what's happening.
2. Skill and knowledge is rewarded exponentially
   Boons are insanely impactful in GW2 due to being multiplicative. If you have quickness all damage you deal is increased by ~33%. Might increases your damage, let's just say for arguments sake, 33% as well. But in effect, this doesn't lead to 66% extra damage. Since the damage remains the same it means you first get 33% damage increase and then 33% on that increased number. In other words, around 75% bonus.
   Most things you can do in GW2 to contribute more to a fight stack multiplicatively. Doing it is rewarded exponentially. Meaning if you don't have everything fully under control, your output suffers drastically. 
   Creating a massive difference between people who aren't set up right vs people who are fully prepared. Because of the feedback problem mentioned above, bridging that gap is very difficult.
3. Jumps in difficulty are always attached to group content
   The story never asks much from you. For good reasons. 
   But the more people play together, the less impact you personally have. Which makes the feedback issue worse. The more your impact is diluted the less clear it is what you could have done better. The less consistency the less you can understand what isn't working right. 
   (Less consistency due to playing with people from LFG or just people who were in your open world map. Or frankly, due to the large amount of variety fractals offer. There's a ton to learn in individual mechanics per map that takes away time and attention from your own performance)
   So when the first jump in difficulty comes up within group content, or worse yet, open world metas with 60+ people. It isn't a smooth learning curve but a very sudden and very harsh spike. Made worse by the social dynamics that inevitably arise. I've seen it described as "dragging the leeches through the content". And that sentiment is a pretty good summary of what's happening here. People are, understandably, not happy about being slowed down by someone inexperienced. And the inexperienced player gets to build up anxiety because others do get annoyed at you. And failure overall annoys you obviously too. But because the spike is so harsh and so much all at once it's extremely difficult to understand what you are doing wrong. You just understand that people are annoyed at you and that you're having a frustrating experience. 
4. Organization is limited in a lot of ways
   Properly setting up sub groups requires extensive knowledge of all elite specializations, of all builds by the commander and even then requires some speculation. Every single person needs to actively communicate, increasing friction points and how long it takes to set up. 
   LFG is full of acronyms that make it intimidating to interact with at first and result in mistakes when people join without having read the full description. 
   It's not a smooth experience to start out at all.
    

EoD does attempt to improve in some areas by putting more emphasis on defiance bars even on smaller enemies in open world.  And there are a lot of design choices that make sense.
But it still falls short of fixing the root sins. Making it hard to learn, hard to understand, hard to improve. While rewarding improvement to an excessive amount. Creating an extremely wide gap between experienced players and people who didn't manage to overcome that spike yet. 

As mentioned above. I don't know a good solution either. But it ends up in a very weird double sidedness in GW2. Where it wants to be and remain a casual, friendly experience. That doesn't focus on min / maxing and focuses on community interactions. While demanding a huge amount of knowledge to even start out with group content. But not really committing to proper group organization tools either as to not enforce too much. But really wanting more people in that kind of content. But not providing good feedback or much opportunity to learn and improve within the game itself. 

What do you think? Are these points on the right track? And how could these things be improved?

Edited March 10, 2022 by Erise.5614
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[Rasimir.6239]

Honestly I think what we (as a community) need most is patience. EoD released 10 days ago, and I think it's doing a decent job showcasing more of the game's mechanics to players. What it can't do is magically turn all players into experts overnight. If it succeeds in making people more aware of what they can do, and possibly making some interested enough to find out more, then that's definitely a plus.

 

Still, the change won't be instant. People need time to learn, to notice things that work/don't work. Come back in half a year, and I'm sure you'll see a higher level of awareness among the general playerbase. Will all players "improve"? No, definitely not, because not everyone is susceptible to this kind of thing. But plenty of people will pick up what EoD is showing them. It just needs some time to sink in and generate enough experience to really show.

[Astralporing.1957]

6 hours ago, Erise.5614 said:

And how could these things be improved?

They cannot. The issues are much deeper than just surface design of events and content types. They are rooted deeply into core game design. To fix them (or even make them less impactful) you'd need a massive rework of several core game systems.

[Teratus.2859]

4 hours ago, Rasimir.6239 said:

Honestly I think what we (as a community) need most is patience. EoD released 10 days ago, and I think it's doing a decent job showcasing more of the game's mechanics to players. What it can't do is magically turn all players into experts overnight. If it succeeds in making people more aware of what they can do, and possibly making some interested enough to find out more, then that's definitely a plus.

 

Still, the change won't be instant. People need time to learn, to notice things that work/don't work. Come back in half a year, and I'm sure you'll see a higher level of awareness among the general playerbase. Will all players "improve"? No, definitely not, because not everyone is susceptible to this kind of thing. But plenty of people will pick up what EoD is showing them. It just needs some time to sink in and generate enough experience to really show.

Both Teq and Triple Trouble had a similar problem when they were first introduced, or reintroduced in teq's case.

A lot of this is impatience, and that's likely because of the turtle but there are also a lot of people who are annoyed because they can't just faceroll this thing like they can with other events.
And it's not just casuals who want to do that either, plenty of "hardcore" players feel this kind of content doesn't belong in the PvE game as well.

Anet has already confirmed that since the release of the event win rates are increasing so clearly people are learning, adapting and beating this event.
Might not seem like it for some people but just because they keep failing, doesn't mean everyone is.

I urge people to keep trying, they will beat it eventually.
That doesn't meant improvements can't be made though, they just fixed some of the RNG issue with the tail so hopefully that will help a lot of people.
But there still needs to be some done about the huge time investment required for this meta.