To anyone who is interested (let it be devs or just fellow forum readers), I’m going to narrate the nightmare that was my experience in the Pavilion. This will be a long post, so feel free to read the td;lr or just let the post die. With the new patch, rewards were buffed a bit and I thought “well, let’s give it a try and aim to organise my megaserver”. Let me start by saying that I really like these kind of events where you reward small groups of people instead of big zergs. And let me say as well that I was really polite and helpful and tried my best to make it work. Now, down to the story.
As soon as I got in, I noticed that we had enough people gathered in the middle (around 50), so it was the perfect scenario to try to organise. I asked for 6 commanders to tag up and, after 5 minutes or so, they did. We tried to make groups of 10-15 people with every commander tag, but just when we were asking people to gather up, bam! people had already donated enough funds to start the event in a minute. Needless to say, we weren’t organised. We just had 6 commanders trying to decide which boss they would face. I’ll try not to extend myself too much, but it was awful. Even when we asked people not to kill their bosses so everyone would kill in rather a syncronized way, they just didn’t care. We also asked them not to go help other bosses since they would only be upscaled and they wouldn’t help us, but they didn’t care either (I didn’t personally because, for funsies, I got the supression message because apparently I write too fast and too much trying to explain all the details of an the event in the mapchat). To sum up, we ended up fighting boom-boom baines (I hate you with all my heart) for 30 minutes. That’s right, 30 freaking minutes where people wouldn’t read mapchat and upscaled the boss.
You would think that our second try would be better, but no. We had groups of 5 people with each commander, but as soon as the event started and the easiest bosses would get killed, again the people would go to other lanes (I won’t say “help”, because we made really clear that they weren’t helping by doing so) and upscale the other bosses (guess which one was the last one…), wasting another 30 minutes. Our third try was pretty much the same, because people would leave and new people would come and they wouldn’t read chat either.
So what do I feel now that I’ve effectively wasted around 2 hours of my life struggling to organise my megaserver? I’ll try to be really constructive:
-Rewards: Rewards are now better but they’re only good if you organise 50 people, the majority of which don’t really care about the event or gold rewards.
-Organisation: Now, here’s the key. Anet requires people to organise to get rewards but don’t give tools to do so. You can’t expect 50 people to read, to follow advices or simply to be helpful. How about closing the gates once 15 people are gathered in one area? There are plenty of suggestions about these so I won’t get into details here.
-Instanced content: You can’t expect random people to work together. I’m sorry, that’s just the way it is. I know everyone wants a perfect world where GW2 players would work together for max rewards or fun content, but the truth is they won’t. And it’s not because they don’t know better, it’s just that they are lazy and won’t read/listen/follow. If we don’t get tools to organise, I’d rather just have this content instanced for guilds. Even if I wouldn’t get to play it, I wouldn’t mind. What I do mind is trying to organise people for 2 hours and getting frustrated without any reward.
Now, I’d like to thank the people who really wanted this content to be organised and played the way it’s meant to be for gold rewards (around 5-10 people?). This means that the people really want this content to be a huge success. I do myself. However, I won’t be doing this type of content ever, ever again. Anet, you just lost one of the few helpful people in open world gw2. Until you give us tools to organise without being such a hassle, I’ll just stay in dungeons or playing the TP. Good day all and thanks for reading.
EDIT: Editted to add the fun supression message anecdote.
TD;LR: After 2 hours of organising people and failing miserably, I’d suggest this content to be instanced or being polished enough so we, the players, don’t have to struggle SO MUCH just to play, but rather play to have a good time, which is the goal games should have. My experience was a nightmare: even if GW2 repetidly tries to make open world organisation work, it just doesn’t. I’ve always been helpful with the community, I’ve tried to organise as much as I can but I’m just done with it. Either they give us tools to organise or they will just frustrate the player base.
(edited by Alex.7052)