A suggestion on delivering more challenging open world metas

[Lance Coolee.9480]

tl;dr - a weekly rotation of higher difficulty, instanced, open world map metas.

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Context:

I'll bet that someone at ArenaNet has a pie chart that depicts where players spend the most time. I'll also bet that these player metrics are used to determine in some way where capital improvement investments are made to the game.

I suspect that casual play content is the lion's share, and challenging content has a slimmer budget. So I'm sure the trouble with delivering challenging content is directly impacted by available budget, and any opportunity to share content between these two categories of personas is welcome.

 

Opportunity Statement:

The risk of trying to bring casual and hardcore players onto the same playing field is that they just want different things and trying to deliver a solution for both instead delivers a solution that works for none. Delivering explicitly unique content for each is directly bound to budgets that are determined by consumption, and inherently favors one group over the other.

 

Proposal:

Reuse the same open world content to deliver a weekly rotation of instanced challenge-mode Map metas. Incentivize through achievements and higher value loot. If the meta for a given week is a bit over or under tuned, adjust for its next challenge rotation. Increase difficulty as desired. Potentially use this as an opportunity to safely expose new encounter ideas and gather feedback that can be worked into new expansions, raids, strikes, etc.

[decease.3215]

If you want challenge why dont you ask for new raid?   Or you want to drive away all the casual player so you could have a personal server?

[ugrakarma.9416]

Is simple: meta trains is the most popular PVE stuff, if they become harder, ppl become more "stuck" and stressed because of a single map, and less popular they become. game will die.

People racking their brains about it is the same thing as people theorizing how to get rid of Blob's from WvW, because they consider blob a "no brainer game". If they introduce some "magic mechanic" to disincentive Blobbling in the WvW, the game-mode will die instead of fabricated "great population of smart elite combat players".

It's an addiction of reasoning that always ends in catch-22: for the "smart group" to work it needs trained people, they don't want to train the noobs, but later then they complain about the decline of the population playing game-mode....... remember that "try hards" of WvW complain when Anet tries to attract newbies, that "these people are not real WvW'ers". So 1 month later they are complaining that the game-mode is dying.

if they lock higher loot behind it, it will become worse,  will be infested with speedrunners looking to make fast gold, groups that have a low tolerance for newbies. Also Anet will do like Fractals CM, removing things from "easy mode". At this point this game will be turned into another WoW or whatsover. The Dungeon itself exemplifies this, when gold was nerfed, speedrunners get out,, so the few groups that still make dungeons stopped requiring things like "exp player".

Just give up that idea, work with already is working and get lesson from here: HoT Metas, LS4 Metas, IBS metas. And try make POF ones work, or another "dead ones" metas. Fix bugs, fix older stuff.

Edited March 11, 2022 by ugrakarma.9416

[ugrakarma.9416]

2 hours ago, Lance Coolee.9480 said:

Opportunity Statement:

The risk of trying to bring casual and hardcore players onto the same playing field is that they just want different things and trying to deliver a solution for both instead delivers a solution that works for none. Delivering explicitly unique content for each is directly bound to budgets that are determined by consumption, and inherently favors one group over the other.

i beat why they come with this: content producers, are hardcores and like make videos promoting the "hard" stuff they beat.

but real problem with GW2, why ppl don't make videos about "epic stuff they beat", is visual noise... when i played neverwinter, the thing was so clear and beaultiful that i make video beating regular mobs....... But instead of work on fix visual noise, they are trying a formula that will just end in irritate casual playerbase.

Edited March 11, 2022 by ugrakarma.9416

[Fueki.4753]

Harder content does not belong in the open world.

It'd would do nothing but drive the vast majority of the playerbase away.

[Peterson.5172]

1 minute ago, Fueki.4753 said:

Harder content does not belong in the open world.

It'd would do nothing but drive the vast majority of the playerbase away.

he did say instanced, which i think it's a good idea, changes things up, something new to do with up to date rewards

[Lance Coolee.9480]

3 hours ago, Fueki.4753 said:

Harder content does not belong in the open world.

It'd would do nothing but drive the vast majority of the playerbase away.

Instanced wouldn't be open world, and would hit some of the basic criteria I think is needed for challenging content:

1. Allows players to specifically opt-in

2. Allows players to control their organization and composition.

3. Allows players to fail fast / recover quickly / repeat the content.

[kharmin.7683]

1 hour ago, Lance Coolee.9480 said:

Instanced wouldn't be open world, and would hit some of the basic criteria I think is needed for challenging content:

1. Allows players to specifically opt-in

2. Allows players to control their organization and composition.

3. Allows players to fail fast / recover quickly / repeat the content.

Like, say, strikes?  Raids?

[Lance Coolee.9480]

48 minutes ago, kharmin.7683 said:

Like, say, strikes?  Raids?

100% definitely. Those are absolutely great delivery vehicles for challenging content.

But if we want to consider new creative approaches to providing challenging content, a (probably) low implementation cost option could be to also provide instanced open-world metas that are higher difficulty. Tons of content to reuse there, and we also get to deliver content like the initial DE meta safely without asking casual players and more hardcore players to have to play in the same sandbox.

[Infusion.7149]

They can use the same instancing as dragonstorm and marionette for any content designed after the Dragon's end debacle.
Have you played Dragonstorm in an instance with around 10 people? It goes by much quicker without leeches and people autoattacking for participation trophies. Last I checked people were doing 60%+ benchmark DPS in squad which is impressive if you don't have subgroups nor any role requests.

You don't need extra achievements, people that want to play with only people they can rely on to finish quicker already have a reward of not wasting time.

What happened is Cameron Rich was moved onto Living World / openworld encounters from the raid and strike teams. You can go watch his interview about "aspirational content" (which doesn't really belong in openworld since you don't get to pick who you play with). That's why you have this dissonance created.  The rest of the earliest raid team is gone including the lead Crystal Reid , Jason Reynolds, Trevor Bennett, Paul Ella , Jon Olson, Steve Waller, etc. Openworld players are used to generally lax timers without absolute failure modes, even Marionette is an example of this in that you can fail a lane and still complete it. If you listen to what Cameron says compared to most of the rest of the encounter team, there's a contrast. As far as I can tell Benjamin Arnold is still on the encounter team and they were responsible for Qadim raid, pretty much the most annoying fixate mechanic in-game with finicky proximity based as well as Twilight Oasis , Shattered Observatory, Deepstone: guess who worked on Harvest Temple strike. Most of the other members of the team are concerned about making the encounters fun rather than ramping up difficulty "to bridge to instanced content" from what I noticed : for example Nick Hernandez was talking about how they introduced the medimissile parachute and the moving tank in Icebrood Saga in one of the Guildchats.

To that end the only way the disparity is reduced is if builds didn't produce 10 times DPS depending on traits as there's no way any encounter can be balanced in that fashion. Gear stats (not the legendary/ascended vs exotic which is only 5% for weapon strength) should definitely matter more along with player skill. Most of Arenanet's staff is artists and designers but at the end of the day the main thing holding it back is not cinematic , design , or audio (all of which are commendable on a 10 year old engine), but balance between classes and the actual numerical disparities and that goes beyond PVE.

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

So, you are asking for instanced maps?  Or do these 'open-world' metas have no pre-events? 

I'm not sure what an instanced open-world meta is, frankly; because it sounds like contradictory terms. 

[Hesione.9412]

3 hours ago, Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:

So, you are asking for instanced maps?  Or do these 'open-world' metas have no pre-events? 

I'm not sure what an instanced open-world meta is, frankly; because it sounds like contradictory terms. 

Same.

 

I know you didn't address this point above, adding in that I disagree with harder events like DE being open world. Look at what happened with Marionette - dead maps unless it's reset. Once people get their turtle unlocked, DE will also die.

[AliamRationem.5172]

Personally, I hope they take the keys away from the guy who made the decision to have the preparation for this event require an hour and a half of waiting around doing the same events over and over again.  What were they thinking?  I hate this meta and it has absolutely nothing to do with the difficulty of the final encounter. 

Please redesign it to function like Dragon's Stand: Gather squads and when enough players are present you begin the march toward the harvest tower.  Get rid of the 1hr30m copy/paste bonanza.