Updated: ArenaNet will add an update on March 15 that alleviates much of this problem (see below).
Guild Wars 2 just had a rousing release of its third expansion, End of Dragons, and it’s already caused a massive stir with the community splitting on how to handle what happens in the last map. The expansion has only been out a little over a week and it has already created massive controversy within the community regarding the overall difficulty of the encounter.
For those readers attempting to avoid spoilers about the expansion, this might be a good time to stop reading; although for the most part anyone who has been following the controversy has probably already gotten more than an earful by now.
The map in question is known as Dragon’s End, which is appropriately named because of what happens there, and it’s the coup de grâce of the expansion featuring one of the most difficult open world metas ever encountered by players in GW2 yet.
First teams can spend an interposing hour to “prepare” the map by running events to bring it from low to high preparedness before the event starts every other hour. Once the event itself starts, players have 40 minutes to follow a three-lane escort that crosses the entire map to fight multiple bosses and overcome relatively simple mechanics, if they fail, the map resets. If they succeed, they move on to The Battle for the Jade Sea.
That’s where things get dicey.
The battle against the elder dragon Soo-Won is on the order of a full-scale open-world raid with intense coordinated mechanics that forces together 50 people onto one platform for 20 minutes through multiple phases. It is a difficult fight with multiple mechanics that requires coordination, preparation and worse no small amount of randomness that can throw the entire thing off.
Another problem for the player base is that the new mount in the expansion – the siege turtle – is locked behind winning the event.
This has led to the playerbase being split between two competing factions: those who enjoy the difficulty and believe that it should stay the same and players who think that it’s way too difficult and it should be toned down so that casual players can actually complete it.
Already well-organized players with guilds who have been playing the game for a long time quickly overcame the obstacles and succeeded with the battle during early days. They advocate for high coordination, having people get into voice chat so that they can stay on top of the mechanics, and learning to gear themselves better to maximize the DPS.
Some from that group have also gone further, claiming that the casual playerbase has become lazy from being handed easy metas previously and could get through all the mechanics if they only paid attention. That they just need to “git gud” and that they’re falling behind because they’re not trying.
There are also some guilds that have been working to organize and help people actually complete the map with the objective of bringing the community together. One example of this is the HardStuck guild, which has begun organizing Dragon’s End maps in order to assist the community in getting the siege turtle mount.
The casual side feels as if the difficulty spike is out of place with most of the other open-world content and that it should be toned down. They are concerned right now that with the difficulty spike there is going to be a problem where too many people are going to look to the event only to get the turtle. This means that many people will drop off the moment that they get it.
For this group of players, the preparation time that it takes to get into the fight, which can take up to two hours, with a high chance of failure creates a colossal disincentive to ever do the map at all. Vox Ex Machina reporters have been playing the map since nearly the beginning of End of Dragons and one, in particular, has racked up over 13 fails.
Even others in the casual community may not have the two hours that it can take to complete the map in the first place. We could take for example the average working adult who might only have two hours to game a night or during the weekend and if there’s a high chance of failure that’s their entire gaming experience.
This intense frustration has led to a number of people lashing out at the players who are arguing that the event should stay the way it is. Some people have even attempted to “boycott” the map by putting their own protest Looking for Group titles. Dragon’s End map organizers have also claimed in tweets that they have been subject to abusive language and being blocked.
Twitch streamer and GW2 content creator Mukluk went on to talk about how this whole controversy has been splitting the community and pitting people against one another. He argued that it shouldn’t be one against another and instead, people should be teaming up against the problem.
He did mention that there is frustration on both sides about the situation and that this is not a stable situation. He himself, even with a large community across social media, still has not gotten a siege turtle himself. In the video above he mentions that he’s spent over 11 hours working on the battle and all of them failures.
He himself said that once he gets it done, he will not be going back. After all, why would he ever “waste two hours on that again” given how poor the rewards for two hours of labor in the meta are. He added that he foresees that if it stays the way that it is, most people will probably end up abandoning this meta entirely eventually in spite of how amazing it looks and how enjoyable it is because of these issues.
To its credit ArenaNet, the developer of GW2, has begun touching up the encounter and changed it once last week and again today. Today’s changes adjust the overall difficulty to reduce some of the mechanics of the fight to make the battle less difficult and a bit more possible to tackle. However, the one change that will be seen as fundamental is on March 15 the Siege Turtle Egg can be unlocked for 200 Writs of Dragon’s End, meaning all of those failed metas can add up to an egg.
This update doesn’t extremely reduce the difficulty of the encounter, which should hopefully keep many of the people who want the encounter to remain a challenge happy and it also provides a way for people to go through the zone and still get their Siege Turtle without feeling as if they’re totally wasting their time.
Image: ArenaNet
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