Yesterday, fueled by a desire to put my thoughts regarding DRMs into words, I spent a couple hours writing a blog post and, hoping to stir up some conversation, posted it on the r/GuildWars2 subreddit. What I did not expect was the sheer outpour of genuine discussion that ensued.
As of my writing this follow-up, over 60,000 people have seen that post, over 1,100 of those people have actually read the article, and collectively we've left almost 100 comments worth of discussion on the Reddit post.
Scattered amongst the replies are a number of interesting ideas and opinions, as well as quite a few misconceptions which I'd like to take some time to discuss. There seems to be some misunderstandings and/or misinformation regarding some aspects of DRMs, which I would like to correct since I have the platform to do so, but I also find many of the other things expressed interesting enough to warrant discussion.
Unlike the previous article, this post will be much less organized and won't really have a central point. I'll divide it into sections based on each of the ideas I want to discuss, include quotes from some of the Reddit comments that inspired that section, and give my two cents. I would also like to take this chance to clarify to you, the lovely reader, that my disagreeing with or correcting someone is not an invitation for you to seek out their original comment and harass them for being "wrong". The primary purpose of this post is to be a flashpoint for further discussion and a learning opportunity for everyone.
The Community Verdict
"no"
"No. They are repetitive and unrewarding... They are not good."
"They are a waste."
"The core design is just not good."
"Nah drms kinda blow."
"Nope"
"No, fuck them"
"No, they are bad."
"... But looking at it objectively - no, we were not too harsh."
"I hate them so much."
In perhaps the least surprising conclusion possible, the verdict from the majority of commenters is that DRMs are bad. The quotes above are only a small selection from the pool of dissatisfied replies, many of which are so brief I'm left to wonder if they even read the article or were simply replying to the question posed by its title.
There were some commenters who shared mixed feelings, with quite a few saying that the format/concept of DRMs was good, but that the ones we got were simply a poorly executed version of that idea. I'll give this idea its own entire section later.
I was surprised to actually find a couple comments that unabashedly enjoyed and praised DRMs, or who expressed that they had no issues with the content and merely avoided them due to the lack of rewards.
"Dragon Response Missions have been great since launch, and are a fantastic way to change up existing zones drastically without 'ruining' the OG zone..."
"Double or even triple the Tyrian Defense Seals and I'd do them daily, especially now after they reworked the pre events."
"In a vacuum I think they were fine..."
"No. They were ABSOLUTE TRASH. Now? Now they are GLORIOUS. Sub 1 min pre, then a pseudo beat em up level. Stay for lore if you want gtfo if not. I was the #1 DRM hater ... and now i think they should add one per release. They are glorious, just add better bosses ... and tune the rewards and BAM! Easy one new dungeon per release."
I think it's great to see that even the most universally-hated content has its fans, and that the recent changes to DRMs have been well-recepted. Also, don't ask me why these quotes are formatted differently than the rest, Blogger is a cursed platform with a mind of its own.
Missed Potential
" Idk something like they COULD be implemented decently but at best arent they just instanced metas?"
"This kind of content, where the elder dragons are actually an active and catastrophic force in the world ... is the kind of content I've been waiting to play since this game launched. So frankly I rather like the concept."
"They are good content by design. Sure, they are not perfect and could need a few improvements ... but in general they are solid content and could make a return."
"From a development perspective, they're what you get when you give, like, two designers a budget of $5 ... From that perspective - cheap-to-make, repeatable, grindy content to tide players over until the next expansion drops - it was definitely successful. But no, the content itself is terrible."
"No. In paper they are a good idea: pseudo-dungeons that can be solo cleared that take around 10 minutes..."
"The idea behind DRM's is amazing. Easy produced content in already existing areas of the game. The problem was, that this has been the only new content for an entire year. And they are simply not fun when you run them over and over again."
"The content is valid but the implementation and timing of it were absolutely terrible."
A number of commenters expressed that they could appreciate the design of DRMs, even if they didn't enjoy the ones we got. In some ways, the format of DRMs is very smart. They let the devs reuse old zones and assets while giving players an interesting look at old areas through a new lens—without altering the actual map, as several commenters pointed out was the fate of Kessex Hills and Lion's Arch. Their formulaic nature, while making the gameplay more repetitive, also allow DRMs to be very easy to make. After all, the IBS team did manage to crank out 10 of these despite Covid, layoffs, and the course-correction demanded by EoD's pending announcement.
The majority of complaints regarding DRMs found in the comments focus on the poor rewards, the bosses being uninteresting, and the instances taking too long, with several people singling out the 2nd event of each DRM as particularly boring. In a theoretical world where these three issues were fixed, would the reception to DRMs have been different?
Personally, I believe the way in which they were released would still have left quite a sour taste in players' mouths, even if the content itself was better. It's also important to remember that DRMs were a means to an end—if ANet had the time and budget to make more interesting events and bosses, they probably wouldn't have invented DRMs in the first place.
Several commenters stated that they'd like to see new DRMs—if they came with better implementation, of course. I actually have to agree with this point. They fill a unique niche of scaling instanced content, and as I pointed out in the original article, they are the only repeatable solo content in the game. That said, I also highly doubt we will ever see a new DRM. The success of Convergences, which fill a similar niche of instanced content that is accessible to open-world players and easy to mass-produce, have been very successful, and will likely be a mainstay in each expansion from now on.
The fact that DRMs are the only real solo content in the game also indicates that ANet have little interest in adding such content, so that doesn't improve their chances either. Finally, DRMs suffer from a branding issue. They're literally named 'Dragon Response Missions', which is an issue because we don't have any dragons left to respond to; it'd be awkward for the same system to exist twice in the game under two different names, so it'd probably be easier on the devs to simply not bother.
A Means to an End
One of the more common misconceptions I saw in the comments—sometimes directly stated, but most often implied—was a pervasive idea that DRMs were an intentional experiment by ANet which failed as a content model, or that they were a "waste of space" which denied us potentially better content.
"They are a waste. Ye, still content but we already had fractals and dungeons when this mess was released."
"If Champions had the same content as the other IBS episodes and let's say the DRMs instead of Strike missions as additional instanced content, DMRs[ˢᶦᶜ] would have been completely fine and much more accepted by players."
"... It might have been okay to have a DRM or two in their current form as a story supplement, but ten of them is obnoxious..."
"... As a replacement for half a season's worth of content it was a complete failure. Playing them on release just felt sad and hollow."
I believe this sentiment is rooted in a lack of understanding of the situation that resulted in the existence of DRMs. For one, I do not believe DRMs as a concept were something that the IBS team was planning on including from the beginning. IBS already came with a major new form of instanced content—strikes—and it wouldn't make sense for them to split their focus between two new content models, nor to save the second one until the very end of the story.
The lack of polish around DRMs as a system is also evidence of this, as is the confused design combining elements of instanced and story content. The IBS team did not plan DRMs in advance, and their existence did not prevent them from making other content during Champions.
Due to a combination of global health issues, layoffs, a lack of budget, and being blindsided by the necessity of killing off two Elder Dragons in a single Living World episode, the IBS team didn't have the time or manpower to create both the story content and the instanced content needed for Champions. DRMs were a last-minute band-aid to the problem, tiding players over by combining all of those things into a condensed, mass-producable content model.
All of this is to say, DRMs most likely were not created intentionally—they are not something the team chose to make instead of better story/instanced content, but the result of them being forced to combine the two. I believe this distinction is important when discussing that era of the game's lifecycle and the choices made by the developers.
To Solo, or Not to Solo
Another misconception I saw regarding DRMs is the idea that it required a group to complete. I've mentioned multiple times in both this and the original article that I consider DRMs to be the only instanced solo content in the game, so it should be obvious I don't think this idea is true at all.
" For years, we were required to have a group to do any of it, and while I understand a lot of content is group conent[ˢᶦᶜ] and this is an MMO, it's also something that was a pain to find a group for."
"Some of them dragged out, or required multiple people to complete if anyone was around. They were best to do when they released, but now, it's hard to find a full group."
I mentioned in the original article that I believed a lack of player skill/poor builds was a significant factor in making the bosses feel less interesting than they actually were. I believe this is also the case here.
I could honestly write an entire article about how the vast majority of the Guild Wars 2 playerbase are actually very bad at the game—and largely at no fault of their own, since the game does a very poor job of directing players or giving them feedback regarding their build and skill level. That is a discussion for another day, however.
DRMs have had difficulty scaling since release, and though I've seen several people make claims that appear to indicate the bosses were made easier in the recent patch, there is no mention of such in the patch notes, and I find it unlikely that they were shadow-nerfed. Every DRM can be rather easily soloed without challenges, and with all challenges on most are still easily completable with an average build, with only the few hardest requiring more optimal solo builds. The idea that they require a group is a misconception born entirely of players who either never attempted to solo the instance, or had a much weaker build than the bosses' HP pools were balanced around.
When I replayed some DRMs for the bonus event, I simply did the first 5, so to account for the possibility that the others really were harder, I went and attempted to solo what is reportedly the hardest one, Snowden Drifts, with all challenges on. I failed the timer challenge, but otherwise beat it with little issue. It was rather hard, but I was using my normal raiding build; if I had a real solo build, I expect it would've been easy to get the third challenge.
This presents a good opportunity to point out another, related concept that many players seem to be unaware of: as far as I can tell, you can't actually fail DRMs—at least, not anymore. In other instanced content, such as strikes, raids, and fractals, bosses reset when you die, forcing you to complete them in one go; this does not appear to be the case for DRMs. Even with the timer challenge on, the instance does not fail and kick you out if you let the timer expire; that challenge simply fails, and it allows you to complete the instance and even still get credit for the other two challenges. All this is to say, even if it isn't pretty or time-efficient, even the worst player can solo every DRM with two challenges on with enough persistence.
Regarding the timer not failing the instance, this seems to be a newer change. I was able to find posts online indicating that it used to kick you out of the mission. I only ever failed a timer once while testing Snowden Drifts for this article, so this may be a mechanic that warrants further testing.
Six Halves of a Whole
The final interesting misconception I noticed regarding Champions and The Icebrood Saga as a whole is that some people seem to treat Champions as a significantly larger portion of IBS than it actually was.
"The first half of ibs was top tier..."
"... But, that didn’t happen because NCSoft wanted Anet to push out EoD, and that caused IBS to just get rushed and we got the disappointment that was the second half of IBS."
"... As a replacement for half a season's worth of content it was a complete failure."
"... Having to throw away all the great work and effort of the first half of IBS, and getting the unavoidable backlash for how meh the rushed content of the second half was, must have hurt."
As should go without saying, Champions does not actually constitute half of IBS's story or content. It is one of five episodes—and that count excludes Bound By Blood, which is labeled as a prologue for some reason but is absolutely a full episode of IBS content in its own right. Then there's also Steel and Fire, which only came with Forging Steel and one (admittedly long) story instance, so we can mark that one as a fourth of an episode.
All in all, that gives IBS a total of 6.25 episodes, meaning Champions only makes up ~16% of IBS's content. Given that the general sentiment among commenters seems to agree that the rest of IBS was generally good, why No Quarter and Jormag Rising keep getting caught in these generalizations?
Of course, it's very possible that I'm looking too deep into people's word choice, and most people simply referred to Champions as "half" of IBS because it's convenient. Alternatively, it's possible that the negative reaction to Champions was so great that it has genuinely warped players' perception of IBS as a whole, leading them to associate perfectly serviceable content with Champions's characteristic lack of quality.
~ ~ ~
That concludes the additional thoughts I had regarding Champions, DRMs, and the ideas and misconceptions present in some of the comments on the previous blog. I probably won't make a third post on this topic, but I hope this one will serve to spark even more conversation regarding a dark time in our favorite game's history, and that some of my rambling was enlightening.
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