I realized one of the biggest problems with EoD final meta

[Labjax.2465]

Prob not the first to realize this, but it struck me recently.

People have compared it to a raid boss and I think that's fair, but in this way, it actually lacks something very important that a raid boss has. Idk exactly how raiding works in this game, but in general, in the raiding format, you take some time to clear trash or mini-bosses and then you reach a raid boss. You can now make attempts on this boss. However long it took you to get there (maybe you had to kill other raid bosses for the week to get to it) you can easily make multiple attempts in one sitting and learn from mistakes.

For a boss like this, even setting aside the prep investment time (which is a lot) you can only attempt it once within a certain time frame window. No room to immediately take lessons learned and apply them, or try some different things. And no guarantee the next time you will get a team that looks even slightly like the last one, unless you're organizing it all tightly via one guild (which doesn't match the pug spirit of GW2's open world anyway).
So even if the group you're doing it with had the patience to try again and had the knowledge and desire to learn from mistakes, you just... can't. It's over. Go home. How many people would do instanced raids in raiding games, much less in a game like this where it's less popular content, if they were like that, I wonder.

The expectations for organization of a raid with none of the design that facilitates progression in the typical raid format. It's no wonder people don't like it.

Edit: Also, AFAIK, there's not much of any DPS check throughout the prep/pres, so you can spend all that time getting to the end fight and even without mistakes fighting it, be doomed to lose from the start because you never had enough DPS.

Edited August 20, 2022 by Labjax.2465

[mythical.6315]

It’s not like a raid boss. The ones who made that comparison haven’t done raids. 

Edited August 21, 2022 by mythical.6315

[Vayne.8563]

The hard thing about raid bosses is that you only have 10 people to do them, and very often specific people have to do specific jobs or the raid fails. We don't need tanks or healers here, because you can rez in the middle. In a raid, if you die, you're dead and out of the fight until the entire team wipes.

There are some complex interactions but with 50 or 75 people on the platform with you, the not-so-good players will get carried as long as there are a few really good players. 

 

Also, most raid bosses don't have trash mobs in Guild Wars 2, so the analogy really doesn't work.

[Ultramex.1506]

Saying a content like raid, imply everyone need to be in their A game with gear check and build

well when a group need quickness, i pop in Harbinger with Dire gear  i bought from TP, it get the job done

And like Vayne said, less skilled player get carried in 50 man squad, you can also rez downed, use wp while other are in combat which you cannot in real raid, 50 people don't need to type /gg to reset the fight

it just an open world meta that have been nerfed to be more doable

[Gibson.4036]

Your point about repeatability and learning is right on.

The mote jump back up to the top phase stood out to me my very first attempt. It’s disorienting, hard to understand exactly what the mechanics are and what the goal is. It’s easy to fail the first time, and then you’ll have to wait until the next time to try again. It’s a terrible way to learn something. 
 

I think it was the fourth time I did the meta before I managed to succeed at that part.

Edited August 21, 2022 by Gibson.4036

[Zok.4956]

1 hour ago, Labjax.2465 said:

Prob not the first to realize this.

Yes, your are a little bit late, the party is nearly over. 🙂

 

1 hour ago, Labjax.2465 said:

you can easily make multiple attempts in one sitting and learn from mistakes.

This has not so much to do with raids, but with instanced (challenging) content in general, where you can wipe /gg and then try again without delay. You can not do this in an open world meta.

 

1 hour ago, Labjax.2465 said:

So even if the group you're doing it with had the patience to try again and had the knowledge and desire to learn from mistakes, you just... can't. It's over. Go home.

Yes, that's a problem, but it only became a problem in combination with the way the DE meta is designed.

 

 

[Labjax.2465]

48 minutes ago, Zok.4956 said:

Yes, your are a little bit late, the party is nearly over. 🙂

I just added that part at the beginning cause I didn't want to sound like I'm bringing up something never been said 6 months later. I still think it's an important component of it that casts into sharp relief why it causes issues when they make an open world boss that is too much like the expectations of a raid in one way or another. Not the only "why", but probably a significant component of why people feel so demoralized dealing with these situations.

And importantly, a reason that has nothing to do with player skill itself (is more about exposure and practice). Much of the discourse I've seen about the fight has been focused on skill in one way or another (arguments about how it should be easier or harder, and about the playerbase's skill level as a whole), and resulted in more friction between people who see themselves as falling into one camp of player or another. Which may be completely pointless red herring friction in the end.

[Vayne.8563]

5 hours ago, Labjax.2465 said:

I just added that part at the beginning cause I didn't want to sound like I'm bringing up something never been said 6 months later. I still think it's an important component of it that casts into sharp relief why it causes issues when they make an open world boss that is too much like the expectations of a raid in one way or another. Not the only "why", but probably a significant component of why people feel so demoralized dealing with these situations.

And importantly, a reason that has nothing to do with player skill itself (is more about exposure and practice). Much of the discourse I've seen about the fight has been focused on skill in one way or another (arguments about how it should be easier or harder, and about the playerbase's skill level as a whole), and resulted in more friction between people who see themselves as falling into one camp of player or another. Which may be completely pointless red herring friction in the end.

People said the same about triple trouble and tequatl when they first launched though.  Then the community learned how to do it. We're moving along to that point now.

There'll always be people complaining content is too hard and there's always been people complaining it's not hard enough but at the end of the day, much fewer people are complaining about it since the changes have been made to it. It's not nearly as hard as it was at launch. It's doable now, even if you fail a few times.

[Gorem.8104]

8 hours ago, Labjax.2465 said:

Prob not the first to realize this, but it struck me recently.

People have compared it to a raid boss and I think that's fair, but in this way, it actually lacks something very important that a raid boss has. Idk exactly how raiding works in this game, but in general, in the raiding format, you take some time to clear trash or mini-bosses and then you reach a raid boss. You can now make attempts on this boss. However long it took you to get there (maybe you had to kill other raid bosses for the week to get to it) you can easily make multiple attempts in one sitting and learn from mistakes.

For a boss like this, even setting aside the prep investment time (which is a lot) you can only attempt it once within a certain time frame window. No room to immediately take lessons learned and apply them, or try some different things. And no guarantee the next time you will get a team that looks even slightly like the last one, unless you're organizing it all tightly via one guild (which doesn't match the pug spirit of GW2's open world anyway).
So even if the group you're doing it with had the patience to try again and had the knowledge and desire to learn from mistakes, you just... can't. It's over. Go home. How many people would do instanced raids in raiding games, much less in a game like this where it's less popular content, if they were like that, I wonder.

The expectations for organization of a raid with none of the design that facilitates progression in the typical raid format. It's no wonder people don't like it.

Edit: Also, AFAIK, there's not much of any DPS check throughout the prep/pres, so you can spend all that time getting to the end fight and even without mistakes fighting it, be doomed to lose from the start because you never had enough DPS.

On release it was a raid boss that raiders could not beat, now with a few extremely tiny nerfs its a raid boss that raiders can beat while the majority of players ignore its existence. Def should have either been instanced or done entirely differently, but honestly I think Anet's already moved past this massive mistake. At least I hope they have so they don't try and pull this again as it was one of the things that made EoD a failed expansion. 
Plus yes, if it was instanced, then you could just do the fight again instantly and not have to wait, it'd be infinitely better, but hindsight is 20/20 right. They did it correctly with Dragonstorm, then did it incorrectly with DE. 

[Luthan.5236]

The biggest problem is my old computer. 😄 (More laggy than other events.) Also people dying and needing a rez will greatly reduce the overall dps I think ... more to than the problem with less optimized builds. Have not played it for weeks now. In the beginning it failed often and I got some lucky tries where we manged to kill Soo-Won. Later I already noticed successful metas regularly when I joined early.

Most of the time it is just coordination + staying alive and doing damage. Main problem are full wipes and people going crazy/losing focus ... I think.

Edited August 21, 2022 by Luthan.5236

[Sunchaser.9854]

As far as things go, I've joined a couple of metadata and beat it the first few tries nut noticed 1/5 fail by a mere 5% dps. I think a big thing people cherish or lament is the fact that in gw2, people can easily complete open world content story with a build that they like or assembled from random drops anywhere from 0.5k-4k random affix builds to 25-35k potentials. 

I think Soo won's metas requires like 50 people to all contribute and boon maybe to like 7-10k dps avg over 50 people. It isn't 20-35k raider high but still a group effort that some can carry, others can fail.

Many people I've seen are happy doing open world with 0.5-5k dps and happy with it. But when it comes to personal player experiences, its not uncommon to hear one person wonder what the fuss was about, they did good damage and boons and had no problem clearing it 18 times. Another person had lost 18 times, and struggled with turtle.

There's no right or wrong playstyle in gw2. All playstyles are viable for gw2 open world and many builds fun. 1k dps or 35k dps, doesn't matter. Mobs all eventually die. But yeah, the ability for players to replay a scuffed run might be good for new players. 

 It's significantly less demanding than gw2 raid content imo but in a place where it's likely to be many open world players first speed bump in the game. And I agree on the idea that maybe toning down frustration points while giving players improvement to aim for could be good for the game.

And letting maybe soo won be reAttemptable  for 30 minutes sounds like a fair compromise. Keeps the challenge. But adds a second try to a 1-2 hr meta. 

Edited August 21, 2022 by Sunchaser.9854

[Zok.4956]

1 hour ago, Vayne.8563 said:

People said the same about triple trouble and tequatl when they first launched though.  Then the community learned how to do it. 

Well actually, both were tests, side content, during a time when there was only the core game and there was no new other content.

Tequatl is now only done because of the massive nerfs and it is quite easy as long as there enough players on the map, not because the community had to learn a lot.  You just need to be on the map when the fight starts. No real need to form subgroups or a squad. And trible trouble is usually ignored if you do not join an organized TS-community. There is only one community left, if I remember it correctly, that is still organizing it. 

 

1 hour ago, Vayne.8563 said:

We're moving along to that point now.

Yes, we are doing this, in a way.

The DE-meta takes too long, but the SooWon fight is easy if you are in a pre-formed (in discord i.e.) squad and have the right build and a squad with subgroups and each subgroup has alac/quickness and you are accustomed to the visual noise and the strangely moving hitboxes. Theses groups do it regularly with nearly 100% success rate.

And all others have learned to ignore it, because there is no real chance to success with an ad-hoc group/map where all players just have their open-world build in this open-world fight.

If SooWon would have been side content or a 50-player instance it still would have some design issues, but there probably would have been less discussions.

But this it the final EOD meta that was described als the culmination of a 10 years arc. And that this open-world content is (more or less) ignored by the majority of the playerbase and even the majoriy of open-world players is a massive failure on Anets side.

The final Open-World EOD-meta, the culmination of 10-years story and open world, should be a fight/meta/design that is so good that it is done from open-world players more than all the other map-metas for a long time. But it is not and this is a big failure.

I don't think Anet will do much more about it anymore. As always they moved along and if the next expansion hits, the EOD expansion will probably be seen as the "covid-expansion" that gave us fishing and skiffs and most of the rest will be forgotten.

 

[Cuks.8241]

42 minutes ago, Zok.4956 said:

But this it the final EOD meta that was described als the culmination of a 10 years arc. And that this open-world content is (more or less) ignored by the majority of the playerbase and even the majoriy of open-world players is a massive failure on Anets side.

The final Open-World EOD-meta, the culmination of 10-years story and open world, should be a fight/meta/design that is so good that it is done from open-world players more than all the other map-metas for a long time. But it is not and this is a big failure.

 

If you check the availability of jade statues on the TP and correlate the price with the amount of people that finish the metas, which I think you can easily do, you will see that the least played meta is Kaineng, the most played is Seitung and Echovald and Soo-Won close together in the middle. 

I wouldnt say its forgotten. It seem it sees plenty of play.

[AliamRationem.5172]

The only problem with the DE meta is that they didn't design the map to function like Dragon's Stand, where you just gather your squad and start the march south toward the final battle.  The prep time for this map is awful.

[Gorem.8104]

2 hours ago, Luthan.5236 said:

The biggest problem is my old computer. 😄 (More laggy than other events.) Also people dying and needing a rez will greatly reduce the overall dps I think ... more to than the problem with less optimized builds. Have not played it for weeks now. In the beginning it failed often and I got some lucky tries where we manged to kill Soo-Won. Later I already noticed successful metas regularly when I joined early.

Most of the time it is just coordination + staying alive and doing damage. Main problem are full wipes and people going crazy/losing focus ... I think.

 

Maybe one difference now is just everyone is playing mechanist, so through lag/not being able to see anything you could still just AA and win without even realising you've won 🙂

[yoni.7015]

After the pretty significant nerfs the fight against Soo-won is no problem whatsoever anymore. Almost all groups finish the fight with at least five minutes left on the timer. 

[Gorem.8104]

16 minutes ago, AliamRationem.5172 said:

The only problem with the DE meta is that they didn't design the map to function like Dragon's Stand, where you just gather your squad and start the march south toward the final battle.  The prep time for this map is awful.

Honestly what is still worse is that if you want to fish/map explore or quest ect. on a map that people are doing the meta on, you are literally taking a slot that someone else wants to do the meta with due to EoD's low player zone counts and map wide meta's scaling based on players in the zone. Whereas in Dragonstand the player count is large, and you can just do the meta three times and end up map complete and do a ton of achievements while being rewarded with good bags and chests to open at every single camp where you can gather and push at any time that suits your fancy or with the main groups that do it at a certain time. Then have the entire zone open afterwards. 

The Jade Sea is open for such a short time after you win. 

Edited August 21, 2022 by Gorem.8104

[Sunchaser.9854]

Yeah, i never got why scaling was never based off players in a encounter and instead like players in a map. Just one of those quirks other games had, but you could like see obviously new players adding hp to boss fights. While gw2 doesn't display boss hp numbers past %, so you could probably do players in a fight scaling pretty easily with it.

Or rework fishing party stacks a bit to make losing those stacks less punishing i hear, so pve fishers and meta events would reward both instead of slightly inconviencing each other perhaps, maybe. etc? 

[Gorem.8104]

2 minutes ago, Sunchaser.9854 said:

Yeah, i never got why scaling was never based off players in a encounter and instead like players in a map. Just one of those quirks other games had, but you could like see obviously new players adding hp to boss fights. While gw2 doesn't display boss hp numbers past %, so you could probably do players in a fight scaling pretty easily with it.

Or rework fishing party stacks a bit to make losing those stacks less punishing i hear, so pve fishers and meta events would reward both instead of slightly inconviencing each other perhaps, maybe. etc? 

Would be nice, honestly the fishing stacks themselves should have never been removed on map close/swap, would have fixed that issue entirely. 

But yeah, the scaling really should be just the people participating, issue really is that its a map wide meta. I think they forgot they reduced the player cap for EoD zones when they designed this fight. Kind of like Marionette, which was originally designed with what, like double the player count we can get inside the instance? That wasn't changed for the instance, which means we were totally carried by power creep. 

[Crono.4197]

I almost forgot this meta even existed. Haven't touched that map since EoD launch, since it was full of people that wanted raid requirements in order for others to join, they bullied players into leaving the map so that their elitist friends can join instead and flamed everyone when something went wrong. Also clearing the meta took me like 15 tries.

Never wanna go throught that ever again and I hope Arenanet never makes a crappy meta like this one ever again.

Edited August 21, 2022 by Crono.4197

[Labjax.2465]

Some other thoughts... two things that I think might improve engagement without touching "difficulty" at all (or the loaded topic that it is) are:

1. add some drizzlewood-like reward system for doing the prep/leadup type stuff
2. get rid of the contributor buff (and adjust dps expectations accordingly), so latecomers can join in without it being a problem for the group's chances. can change it to a participation bar instead, relating to 1st point

I mean, realistically, showing up partway through a meta is a pretty big thing in this game. And to be penalized for doing that in a way that hurts the entire group's chances... like setting aside engagement for a moment, that just goes against GW2's usual design of wanting you to be happy that somebody showed up in the open world.

And re: scaling, if y'all are saying it's including people who aren't even on the platform, that is wacky as hell.

[yoni.7015]

5 minutes ago, Labjax.2465 said:

Some other thoughts... two things that I think might improve engagement without touching "difficulty" at all (or the loaded topic that it is) are:

1. add some drizzlewood-like reward system for doing the prep/leadup type stuff
2. get rid of the contributor buff (and adjust dps expectations accordingly), so latecomers can join in without it being a problem for the group's chances. can change it to a participation bar instead, relating to 1st point

I mean, realistically, showing up partway through a meta is a pretty big thing in this game. And to be penalized for doing that in a way that hurts the entire group's chances... like setting aside engagement for a moment, that just goes against GW2's usual design of wanting you to be happy that somebody showed up in the open world.

And re: scaling, if y'all are saying it's including people who aren't even on the platform, that is wacky as hell.

In my experience latecomers aren’t really a problem because there aren’t many and you can easily compensate them. And they already nerfed it so you need 5 stacks instead of 10 before the escort.

Edited August 21, 2022 by yoni.7015

[IAmNotMatthew.1058]

12 hours ago, Labjax.2465 said:

People have compared it to a raid boss and I think that's fair, but in this way, it actually lacks something very important that a raid boss has. 

On release you could compare it to Raids, but not anymore.

[Linken.6345]

1 hour ago, Labjax.2465 said:

Some other thoughts... two things that I think might improve engagement without touching "difficulty" at all (or the loaded topic that it is) are:

1. add some drizzlewood-like reward system for doing the prep/leadup type stuff
2. get rid of the contributor buff (and adjust dps expectations accordingly), so latecomers can join in without it being a problem for the group's chances. can change it to a participation bar instead, relating to 1st point

I mean, realistically, showing up partway through a meta is a pretty big thing in this game. And to be penalized for doing that in a way that hurts the entire group's chances... like setting aside engagement for a moment, that just goes against GW2's usual design of wanting you to be happy that somebody showed up in the open world.

And re: scaling, if y'all are saying it's including people who aren't even on the platform, that is wacky as hell.

Yes and you can do prep on a character then logoff timer only go down when you play so you could always have 10 stacks at the start of a meta.

[Silent.6137]

6 hours ago, Gorem.8104 said:

Honestly what is still worse is that if you want to fish/map explore or quest ect. on a map that people are doing the meta on, you are literally taking a slot that someone else wants to do the meta with due to EoD's low player zone counts and map wide meta's scaling based on players in the zone.

 

6 hours ago, Sunchaser.9854 said:

Yeah, i never got why scaling was never based off players in a encounter and instead like players in a map.

I assume the both of you hardly ever do the DE meta if you think scaling is map-wide. It is not. That has been discussed and explained enough times in other threads.

5 hours ago, Labjax.2465 said:

Some other thoughts... two things that I think might improve engagement without touching "difficulty" at all (or the loaded topic that it is) are:

1. add some drizzlewood-like reward system for doing the prep/leadup type stuff

Most players are impressed with chests that they can see regardless of how little value they actually are. If they're auto-loot like DE metas, then many will think they're not getting good rewards.

Take the boss blitz at Fot4Winds for example. Wow, all these loots! Until you realize you're getting bags and chests upon opening chests. And yet more bags upon opening those. The rewards are certainly decent but definitely not great.

As suggested before, make all phases drop non-auto lootable chests, and people's percerption will be different.

4 hours ago, Linken.6345 said:

Yes and you can do prep on a character then logoff timer only go down when you play so you could always have 10 stacks at the start of a meta.

You can log off or map change and you won't lose the stacks. And they can be fully charged to 2 hours by just doing  another event. Not sure if the stacks persisr over reset since I've never tried it. Always finishes the meta, which will remove the stacks.

Edited August 21, 2022 by Silent.6137