Who is the Dragon's End meta for?

[Deihnyx.6318]

1 hour ago, EveningTempo.4796 said:

Casual players are angry at Anet for making Seitung, Kaineng, and Echovald the usual stroll through the park and then telling them Dragon's End "was designed from the start to be challenging, but progressively more doable as players learn mechanics and how to handle phase transitions."

That is your opinion, and it seems that you at least won't shut down the very idea of offering more challenging content, only it's execution.

I did comment on the execution, and I agree to an extend that it's not the best. The waiting time to retry after failure is too long, and I get the frustration on that at least.

But some people in these forums (not so much in game) are turning down the very idea of having this type of content, in very derogatory terms, often calling out "hardcore players" as being the one "hating on casual" and making them feel bad while it's absolutely not what's happening, on the contrary.

For a lot of players, it's not about "bragging" for having beat it. You can't really brag when the event has to be done in cooperation with 50 other players anyway. It's that this kind of content offers a unique experience, because it incentivizes cooperation, self-organization and overall offers a stepping stone towards more challenging content. It absolutely has its place in an MMO. And there's barely any of that in this game.

So balancing the meta, fixing some of its issues, yes. But the meta itself should stay, should keep its mechanics, and the focus should be on making learning smoother, the retry faster, and offer consolations prizes exactly the same way other type of more challenging content gets.

The game is 10 years old, we've had countless of meta that had issues at first, that were supposedly impossible, all are a joke today. And it's not just because Anet nerfed them. Players just got to learn them. It's possible when you are patient.

 

And in my opinion, patience seems to be an unspoken problem here. Pretty much all new mounts had some level of backlash one way or another. Gryphon was too expensive (no, it wasn't if you commit to it), the Skyscale was too long (even though super easy) and now this one is 'impossible' even though it hasn't been two weeks. Heck, you even read players call it a scam because they don't have it yet.

Impatience doesn't really work well with MMOs and the need for instant gratification is guarantee that players won't stick to your game for very long. There needs to be short, medium and long term goals. Maybe the advertisement was awkward (Anet makes... odd choices when it comes to advertising...) but just like the last 3 mounts this was meant as a medium term goal.

 

Edited March 12, 2022 by Deihnyx.6318

[Caitybee.3614]

14 hours ago, EveningTempo.4796 said:

Crossposting this because I doubt Anet looks at their subreddit.

 

Few people are happy with the way EoD's open world finishes out. Who are they? Through the process of elimination:

 

1. Dragon's End is not for casual gamers with a language barrier, slower reaction times, or any other ability-limiting factor. The story mode up to this point has barely prepared them for the new strikes, and it has definitely not prepared them for this. In most other metas victory is achieved merely by stacking on the driver or, if there isn't one, going to where all the people are. In the few metas that are somewhat difficult, a handful of veteran players can carry the map to victory with extremely basic coordination - no build checks, no voice chat, no hour-long prep. Compare to Dragon's End where each casual player in the instance significantly lowers the chance of success. Once a handicapped player realizes this, they have two options. Give up, or continue to grief 50+ players for hours at a time hoping to get carried.
2. Dragon's End is not for casual gamers who are easily discouraged by elitism and toxicity. These are players that have the will and potential to learn game mechanics and skill rotations but are put off by high-end players that have neither the time nor the patience to train them. To the GW2 community's credit, there are still plenty of people that will answer honest questions in map chat. However, if the casual gamer happens to be in an organized instance, the members of the organized squad have more incentive than ever to ask or tell this player to leave the map. Even if other veteran players do not agree with the idea of this kind of gatekeeping, more often than not they just let it happen because after failing the meta for the umpteenth time they need every advantage they can get.
3. Dragon's End is not for anyone who is easily discouraged by failure. Mid-level and hardcore gamers especially already feel like they cannot improve further, cannot do anything more to improve the odds of success. Aggravating this issue is the fact that players of all skill levels are constantly killed in demeaning ways. Those that are downed too far from the stack will not be resed given that the fight is a DPS check. Those that are caught in whirlpools will not be freed given how chunky the breakbars are. Those that are chain cc'd outside of Aurene's crystals have no choice but to watch the slow march of the tidal wave consume them. What's odd is that the final story boss has established that people don't have to die for the battle to feel epic. Or are the invincible commanders (of their personal stories) just supposed to accept that in reality (the open world) they are just redshirts?
4. Dragon's End is not for mid-level or hardcore gamers who are used to being rewarded for their commitment. The reward for completing the meta is not proportional to the length or difficulty of the meta. Failure gives almost no rewards, failure is time-consuming, and failure is common. In order to feel fair the rewards for success must be very enticing. The biggest reward for success is a one-off collection starter. There is no real reason for players that want good return on investment to continue to slave away in Dragon's End after their first clear.
5. Dragon's End is not for players with low-end devices.
6. Dragon's End is not for players with high latency.
7. Dragon's End is not for players with poor luck. Even if you do not fall into any of the aforementioned categories, you must avoid being dropped into an instance that has been doomed by too many inexperienced players and/or invuln spams.

In conclusion, Dragon's End is for players that are: able to play (if not already playing) the game at a higher level than what the story has trained them for; okay with being told to leave; okay with telling others to leave; okay with feeling powerless to hard-carry themselves; okay with walking away from a 2 hour session with only the friends you made along the way to show for it; equipped with a decent computer and internet connection; and pretty lucky.

Apparently this meta is for no one other than elitist players or raiders. I was in the map for about 6 hours today and only 1 map I spawned in went all the way to Soo-Won. Every other map nobody wanted to tag up, and only 2/3 escorts were completed. I was farming Writs for the turtle egg update on the 15th as it's much easier, and for right now the meta is still not possible for me. I've lost it 12 times now, and once I have the turtle, I'm never going back to Dragon's End.

[EveningTempo.4796]

6 minutes ago, Deihnyx.6318 said:

That is your opinion

 

 

Considering all the people I've spoken with that are quite angry with Anet for how they handled difficulty progression, this take that my observation is merely an opinion piece will be a sell harder than the pink panther.

Whatever people are bashing all hard content on account of just another Anet moment deserve all the flak they get. But the rest of the (justified) vitriol is in reaction to being told that they are silly to be unhappy with the difference in what they were made to expect from EOD compared to what they actually got. If your company or your parents make a mistake that affects you, and then your unaffected coworker or sibling tries telling you that what they did wasn't a mistake or that the mistake wasn't a big deal, you would rightly assume their tone deafness comes from being unaffected by the mistake. And you would call them out for lacking the empathy that they would have wanted from you if they were in your shoes and you in theirs.

This game does need more stepping-stone and community-engagement content. But if it's going to be a meta, that meta better be done perfectly, because metas are pretty much the one thing that every single player is going to do at least once. And unlike what diehard tryhards are saying, introducing exclusivity to content that has thus far been overwhelmingly inclusive is a good way to ensure that the people who were newly excluded spend less time building their characters than Anet spends building trust issues. Why improve when the meta is going to be nerfed until it becomes inclusive again?

You're right when you say that most players have the necessary friction between brain cells to understand that winning this poorly designed clusterfight isn't an achievement to be proud of. And yet there are plenty of people here and ingame that don't get it and will die on capitol hill arguing that they are in the top percentile of gamers for doing it. These characters also deserve all the flak they get. Toxic is toxic.

Impatient people do play MMOs so it's a given that some of them will complain about all the work that goes into unlocking mounts. I myself put off working on a skyscale for a long time because of the enormous list of tasks I saw on its wiki page, but I knew better than to complain because it is, after all, just a QOL thing that wasn't advertised as a selling point for LWS4. But you know what was advertised for EOD? Siege turtle. And unlike with griffon and skyscale which required patience in completing the laundry list of collections to unlock them, turtle is requiring patience in completing an unforeseen, unfruitful, unforgiving, unfulfilling, unfair, unfun (before you ask yes I only started with the last three and decided to look up some more) boss battle that has to be won by pug group lottery even before you can start the usual collection grind. If you spent 10 hours working on getting your griffon, you were 10 hours closer to getting your griffon. 10 hours spent working on getting your turtle could mean getting no closer to getting your turtle at all (which was the case for me and many, many others) and that's not a problem of patience, it's a problem of quest design.

[HnRkLnXqZ.1870]

Jikes, so many topics about this meta O_O. And most of them are negative :S.

Had a funny idea recently. Why not give the DE meta the Dragonstorm/Twisted Marionette treatment?

1.) Leave the current DE meta as it is. Hard as hell, difficult and challenging for raid-mains and other hardcore people. Boost the loot, so it is actually worth the trouble. Let it drop MC dailiy, maybe clovers or prohpet shards and some really good materials. The rewards should be high enough, to challenge the top farming method at the moment in gold/time efficiency. Now make this an instanced version, with a capacity of 50-100 players. Give us an option to enter the same instance with up to two pre-grouped squads, without the brain-dead RNG where people get randomly placed into instances. So the hardcore players can play with each others. The RNG distribution of players is a joke since Dragonstand and ruins every good pre-set group. 

2.) Tone down the open world version of the DE meta to a level where regular players can enjoy it. Easier clear-conditions for the complicated mechanics. E. g. green circles, fight progresses when 1/3 were completed, not all. Add more breakbar-phases, reduce the HP pool. ... What people enjoy in meta-events. Working together on a normal level. Leave the loot as it is now or slightly modify it to address a casual playerbase. Low droprates of exclusive materials, no MC or shards, but maybe map-reward tokens or charged quartz crystals. Something we find useful, but does not hurt the ego of those who do the hardcore thing. 

Who wants to play hard can play hard and the casual ones can still enjoy a decent map-meta. 

[Labjax.2465]

To me, how it comes across as that "who this meta is for" is for Anet. At this point in the game's life, it has very little going for it to stand out. It has long developed tendencies that make it similar to the grind of other MMOs, despite putting its own spin on the process. The one thing it's got going for it that (to my knowledge) no other MMO really does is its open world event chain / boss battles, or what everybody calls metas (dunno where that term comes from, but anyway, that's neither here nor there). But if the reputation for these is that they are dead easy, then at a glance, it doesn't sound like the game is doing anything interesting. On the other hand, if it has a reputation of being epic experiences like no other game, that word spreads.

I suspect that is their intention (I am, I will fully admit, doing a lot of speculating here).

Then I think the reality they don't want to admit to themselves is that most people aren't doing their "epic" metas because they are gobsmacked and enthralled having a good time, but because of the rewards attached to them. That if they removed the rewards from their metas tomorrow, most people would simply stop doing them. Because many of their metas are more time-consuming, repetitive, and sometimes downright exhausting than they are enthralling, engaging, and fun.

But if they hold out on this idea that people really want the challenge (scanning for posts from a handful of players to confirm that notion) they can validate to themselves this idea that their metas are epic and it's what people play GW2 for. They can feel accomplished for giving an experience like no other. And ignore the players lost because of their insistence on it as casualties in their quest for recognition in the MMO world.

Or maybe I'm overthinking it and it's just that they are repeatedly having raiding devs make open world encounters; people who are great at making 10 or 20 person instanced raids, but are utterly clueless about the dynamics of GW2's open world system and how people engage with it in practice. It would help explain why some of the story encounters also feel like raid bosses (to an obnoxious degree) if they are having raiding devs make them too. Round peg in a square hole stuff.

[Raffrey.5271]

I've done with this meta. This is definitely not for me.

If future open world contents are like this, then this game is no longer for me. And I'll move on.

Seriously, developers. Keep your raid content instanced.

[Minjin.8259]

52 minutes ago, Labjax.2465 said:

To me, how it comes across as that "who this meta is for" is for Anet. At this point in the game's life, it has very little going for it to stand out. It has long developed tendencies that make it similar to the grind of other MMOs, despite putting its own spin on the process. The one thing it's got going for it that (to my knowledge) no other MMO really does is its open world event chain / boss battles, or what everybody calls metas (dunno where that term comes from, but anyway, that's neither here nor there). But if the reputation for these is that they are dead easy, then at a glance, it doesn't sound like the game is doing anything interesting. On the other hand, if it has a reputation of being epic experiences like no other game, that word spreads.

I suspect that is their intention (I am, I will fully admit, doing a lot of speculating here).

Then I think the reality they don't want to admit to themselves is that most people aren't doing their "epic" metas because they are gobsmacked and enthralled having a good time, but because of the rewards attached to them. That if they removed the rewards from their metas tomorrow, most people would simply stop doing them. Because many of their metas are more time-consuming, repetitive, and sometimes downright exhausting than they are enthralling, engaging, and fun.

But if they hold out on this idea that people really want the challenge (scanning for posts from a handful of players to confirm that notion) they can validate to themselves this idea that their metas are epic and it's what people play GW2 for. They can feel accomplished for giving an experience like no other. And ignore the players lost because of their insistence on it as casualties in their quest for recognition in the MMO world.

Or maybe I'm overthinking it and it's just that they are repeatedly having raiding devs make open world encounters; people who are great at making 10 or 20 person instanced raids, but are utterly clueless about the dynamics of GW2's open world system and how people engage with it in practice. It would help explain why some of the story encounters also feel like raid bosses (to an obnoxious degree) if they are having raiding devs make them too. Round peg in a square hole stuff.

Let me preface this by saying I have now failed it 20 times.  So I am currently in the "I never want to see this meta again" group.  But I also won't say never because I don't know what they will do with it in the future.

 

That being said I am sure this is really hurting the devs, and they are probably hating us in their hearts as much as we hate the meta right now.  They poured a lot of time and effort into it, so for that I do feel bad for them.  But a team of people also poured their heart and souls into creating the Hindenburg.  I hate to insult their efforts, but I also don't like being covered in pain patches from trying to beat it.  It's a long meta, we all know that.  My trigger finger hasn't acted up in months and now I can barely move my hand.  Yes that's on me for doing it too much.  But I also wonder, did they actually play it with just random/casual players to beta test it?  I think many casual players do like a challenge now and again.  That is why a PvE player will occasionally pop into a fractal or raid or WvW or whatever thing they find to be a challenge.  But there is a vast difference between a choice and more or less being forced into it to get the turtle/end of the story.  So I do hope they recognize that we can appreciate their hard work on this but it still needs changes.