Guild Wars 2

First of all let me say that this event is/was AWESOME!! Anet did an amazing work with this event taking care of every little detail, many things were perfect and i couldnt be more happy, BUT!.

theres always a but.

This game as far as i know have something called prestige over power, am i right? but this is not entirely true, its more like “luck over prestige, over power”

why?

i ran almost 40 MK runs heck i even read people who ran almost 100 runs.

what i got? deathly shoulder pad skins (i dont complain they are pretty cool) but some people got squat, its true this skins are meant to be “rare” or may i say unique, but giving the luck factor i think its pretty dumb to say it gives prestige over those who were there and got nothing.

some people got their exotic halloween themed weapon in less than 5 runs, some are up to theirs 100+ runs hoping to get one.

this is where i say, i support grindind over luck factor, i rather run 40 mk dungeons if that gets me WHAT I WANT, instead of some random roll dice that decides what i get.

get my point?

lets say those who were lucky this event may not be in the next one, lets say you love a skin from the next event but you see yourself running 100+ a dungeon with tiny hope to get the item you want and you might not get it after all.

for those who support this system of lady luck, please think outside the box, would not o you love to work for what you want instead of a random roll dice that may award you or may not in the next 1000 tries?.

on a side note: i always tought that RNG its a lazy concept.

Normally I’d agree but since this is a limited time event having it be a huge grind would only punish people with more casual playing time. With RNG casuals at least have a chance.

I agree 100%. I’m not big on grinding, but I hate relying on the RNG even more. At least with some sort of token/grind system, you know that the effort you put in is actually making progress towards your goal.

Seconded.

/15

I’ll say this, the best rewards should have come from the clock tower. However, I did love the event and look forward to the other ones.

second this, over 45 runs not got anything worth my while

But, wasn’t there a little of everything? You can grind to get all the mats for the weapon skins. You can luck out on drops in the dungeon, labyrinth, or chests. You could buy stuff from the cash shop. You could get a pair of nice boots with skill in the clock tower. And, there was the quest line for the tome back piece and its upgrade. It seems like they had it all covered to me.

I did well over 100 runs and I feel like I’m on a never ending streak of Spooky Tonics. I also got 3 worthless lvl 76 exotics and a booster now and then.

There are some people out there who earned more than I did from this just by doing 2-3 runs. So yeah, no comment.

there should be some tokens for such events like this. i ran over 100 mad kings and got no rare skin weapon, and my friend got 2 rare items just in 10 runs – over 60 gold per hour. RND FTW?

Who says the only solution is to add a token grind?

It works but there are other solutions.

What about just having a soulbound version of the items be available for completing certain objectives related to the event.

If limited to 1 per account, this allows casual players to still get access to one skin they like. This also prevents the entire economy from crashing in on itself the way this method did.

I think they should add some Mystic Forge recipes, the ingredients being all the various Halloween drops + mystic coins, and the output being Halloween tokens that you could exchange with an NPC for Halloween Items.

This way, no matter what activities you do, you will have some progress towards what it is you are hoping for. If you don’t get enough tokens for that rare drop, you’d always have a leg up for next time Halloween comes around.

Plus the event isn’t over. Maybe the mini dungeon and chest was the Mad Kings way of having fun (watching everyone squirm) and everyone gets choice of something at the end. /speculate

My point is, let’s not judge until the event is over

Why punish players who have a life, in favor of those that don’t?
It’s exactly why I get bored and don’t play typical grindy MMOs.

lifebird.1845:

Why punish players who have a life, in favor of those that don’t?
It’s exactly why I get bored and don’t play typical grindy MMOs.

Picking 1% of the playerbase at random and mailing them 300g while everyone else has to struggle to get by is a lot worse.

Why play an MMO when people who play get punished in favor of those whose name gets drawn out of a hat?

Well that’s not accurate either, nobody is being given anything worth NEAR 300g. And how do you figure those who don’t have special skins are being punished? I don’t follow.

Flabber Babble.8720:

Well that’s not accurate either, nobody is being given anything worth NEAR 300g. And how do you figure those who don’t have special skins are being punished? I don’t follow.

Because all the long term goals are based on money in this game.

And yes, people were given 300g. One of my guild members got two of the craftable weapons from random chests within 10 minutes of each other, and got a black lion key from the mad king boss fight, which resulted in the chain greatsaw. He instantly made 300g selling them on the trading post.

Trivializing long term goals for a random portion of the game and making them nearly unattainable for the rest goes against the design philosophy of the game, it makes the game anti-fun, because anti-fun is the only way to ever reach these goals. Cross posting this from yesterday.

Cerise.9045:

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I’ll explain why stuff like this is a problem.

Once you’ve done everything in GW2 you need to set your own goals to keep enjoying the game. ANet knows this because in GW1 after people were done with the story in 30 hours they kept playing because these people set their own goals after that.

So what are the goals you can set in GW2 to keep playing more than 50 hours after beating the story and exploring everything? Since in this game it all boils down to getting cooler things to bling out your character with, and the most efficient way by far in this game to get anything cool is off the trading post, every long term goal involves making more money. There are also dungeons but you can get a full dungeon set in 2-3 weeks so that’s not really long term.

The problem here though, getting all these cool stuff(and in turn getting money) is completely based on pure blind luck

You can break it down really simply

• Completing your long term goals using effort, skill and persistence = fun
• Completing your long term goals as a result of pure and blind dumb luck = anti-fun

Basically what this means is that ANet tainted to long term entertainment value of the game by overloading it with anti-fun.

Random drops are a part of the the MMORPG genre, but this is a really horrible way to implement them. There is no skill or effort involved with the event, it’s just pressing a button and waiting 20 minutes to for something to pop out, then pressing the button again.

The long term goals are there to give you something exciting to look forward to, to work towards, and to make it fun. So alright, most of these goals are tied into making money right? Now look at how you make money.

• You can play 500 hours and save up every scrap of gold while barely getting by
• You can mess with the trading post, make some spreadsheets, analyze the market
• You can buy gems
• You can spend 10 minutes killing a boss and get a drop worth hundreds of gold

I personally chose the 2nd option because the first isn’t worth it, the 3rd doesn’t make you feel like you earned it, and the last is just dumb luck which I never had.

The whole idea is that working for hundreds of hours is just pointless when you can make much more than that just by just getting lucky or staring at spreadsheets all day.

Personally I would rather reach long term goals by actually playing the game, and doing things that are fun. Instead our options are to be poor or to participate in anti-fun.

Same goes on a smaller scale with these events. Having rewards to work towards would be extremely fun. Just having it be a random drop for just pushing a button or buying it off the trading post is anti-fun.

Makes me feel like the reward system in this game is straight out of a nexon game, and it has tainted an otherwise amazing game.

I agree that a “token for skin” system would be nice, but the MK dungeon allows us to get many of the same items you’d get from a Black Lion chest (even keys). I’m sure that those of us who don’t go out and buy tons of BL chests are appreciative of this fact.

But OP, camping a specific spawn or area for a chance at a lucky drop is the epitome of grinding. Is this your first MMO?

Vanecrox.5094:

I agree that a “token for skin” system would be nice, but the MK dungeon allows us to get many of the same items you’d get from a Black Lion chest (even keys). I’m sure that those of us who don’t go out and buy tons of BL chests are appreciative of this fact.

They could do it like Rift did with events. They had a special mount for one of them that had like a 0.1% chance to drop from rifts(dynamic events) so any random person could get one. But another way to get them was to play 5 hours per day every day doing event stuff and gathering 5000 or whatever of the event currency for that event(you couldn’t buy that currency off other people so you had to earn it) and buy the mount from the event vendor. The amount of currency needed was really high so only the few people who did an insane amount of grinding for it got it and you had to pass up on some weapons and costumes and whatever because they used the same currency and you’d never be able to get everything so it was still a trade-off. But people who didn’t grind for it also had a chance to get the mount as just a random drop from doing the events.
And of course all of it is soul bound to protect the market from abuse.

Here’s the thing though: they put in an option to grind out the legendary items via crafting. They also have both free and paid chests for most of the items, and they can be sold on the BL. People are complaining about each of these options, separately and collectively. What is the sensible alternative? Honestly?

Personally, I’m running the content, but I’m not going to care much if I don’t get a holloween exotic/skin. It’s just cosmetics, after all…

And to repeat myself from earlier. There’s act 4 coming around soon, who knows what that will bring. Maybe everyone gets something special, stay tuned.

Nageth.5648:

Normally I’d agree but since this is a limited time event having it be a huge grind would only punish people with more casual playing time. With RNG casuals at least have a chance.

Frankly, those casual players will probably never see them either. The vast majority of them are just going to come from hardcore grinding of the dungeon anyway. So it’ll pretty much be hard core grinders who didn’t get the rare weapon and hard core grinders, who are also lucky, and did get the weapon. That’s just because the chance of winning is so low, its almost meaningless for casual players.
As far as a token system goes, it’d probably have to be tradable tokens for a short event like this or else many people won’t be able to make it. Of course, the end result would still be very expensive weapons that casual players won’t get, but at least we’ll make some money from the tokens :p

Cerise.9045:

Vanecrox.5094:

I agree that a “token for skin” system would be nice, but the MK dungeon allows us to get many of the same items you’d get from a Black Lion chest (even keys). I’m sure that those of us who don’t go out and buy tons of BL chests are appreciative of this fact.

They could do it like Rift did with events. They had a special mount for one of them that had like a 0.1% chance to drop from rifts(dynamic events) so any random person could get one. But another way to get them was to play 5 hours per day every day doing event stuff and gathering 5000 or whatever of the event currency for that event(you couldn’t buy that currency off other people so you had to earn it) and buy the mount from the event vendor. The amount of currency needed was really high so only the few people who did an insane amount of grinding for it got it and you had to pass up on some weapons and costumes and whatever because they used the same currency and you’d never be able to get everything so it was still a trade-off. But people who didn’t grind for it also had a chance to get the mount as just a random drop from doing the events.
And of course all of it is soul bound to protect the market from abuse.

But that’s more or less exactly what we have now and what you criticise. Except for soul binding, which is about the most anti-fun feature in existence, period. Soul binding doesn’t protect the market, it eliminates it.

I support having the option of having both a token system and a rng system. There is no reason to have only a rng system other than making an item hard to acquire, which can easily be achieved by having an alternative with a high grind and makes it a guarantee. That way both casual and more active players have a fair and better chance at getting the items they want. This way more people are satisfied with the content.

The skins were basically priced out of the reach of casuals from the start. I hope in future events Anet decides to just put the skins on the gem store and build some customer good will instead of just lunging directly for their wallet.

But then again, this is a company which is under the impression that RNG grind based activities are fun.

In the end, I would have spent $10-20 getting the few skins I wanted from the event if i were given the chance to just flat out buy them from the gemstore. Anet will have to settle for the $0 they got from me.

I was personally hoping that Anet would hold true to their GW1 style of events and then meld them with their DEs.

Complete a DE chain and get a holiday item. Each Act would release a new DE chain.

What we got was mostly more of the same; farming goals.

The book ghost hunting chain was, IMO, the best part of the event so far. Actually had to figure it out (didn’t use a wiki or Google) – course, once I figured out the place/zone – it wasn’t hard to follow the train of players to the spot; but still.

Hope they move away from more farm/grind items; Cash Shop only stuff in the future.
Add in mostly inclusive rewards for completing events instead. /shrug

WasAGuest.4973:

I was personally hoping that Anet would hold true to their GW1 style of events and then meld them with their DEs.

Complete a DE chain and get a holiday item. Each Act would release a new DE chain.

What we got was mostly more of the same; farming goals.

The book ghost hunting chain was, IMO, the best part of the event so far. Actually had to figure it out (didn’t use a wiki or Google) – course, once I figured out the place/zone – it wasn’t hard to follow the train of players to the spot; but still.

Hope they move away from more farm/grind items; Cash Shop only stuff in the future.
Add in mostly inclusive rewards for completing events instead. /shrug

Hire this guy, Anet!

You basically just described what I was hoping for as well.

i agree
there is no joy in gambling, only loss

I made a similar post. RNG is no good. The guy who broke down the fun vs anti fun and how we have to make our own endgame goals was spot on.

I think ANET will refine things and get it better as time goes on.

I participated actively in every single part of this event, grouped up, soloed, did the clock tower, mini games, explored every part of the maze, opened chests, made the recipes at the forge, have done around 30 Mad King runs and bought 40 dollars worth of keys then made the king chests. And I’ve gotten absolutely nothing except the one thing I could earn outside the RNG – Mad King Slippers (which are not even a unique skin).

I’m bummed of course, though there is still more time left. But honestly, I feel like my luck will just continue out and I’ll only see the prices of the cool items rise beyond reach or reason. Meanwhile some people say they got Arachnophobia or The Crossing a handful of runs in.

It just…. Sucks. QQ

In the last couple days of farming MK, I had my good days and bad days.

1st day : 100+ MK runs with little more than 1~2 exotics
2nd day: 50~70 MK runs, 2~3 exotics along with an one that had traveler rune attached
3rd day: 100+ MK runs, got The Crossing + The Mad Moon and Recipe: Gift of the Spiders + 1~2 exotics

The key to grinding is always to have a positive mindset, you may never know when that next run would yield you that legendary halloween item. So how about quit the whining here, and play just a few more MK runs? ^^ Honestly, you should’nt just expect to be spoon fed in every way to be able to enjoy game content. Sure you pay for this game called GW2 that you expect less grindfest, but you need give out that 50/50 effort. If you wanna be rewarded, it’s always that golden MMO rule : Pay with time, or pay with money. =) As a MMO player whom has much experience with KRMMOs, I can say this game gives you alot more breathing space when it comes to RNG.

Isnt ANET supposed to be redefining the MMO?

@KuroKanden:

let me break maths for you

(counting madking says, and hoping your team has a good dps and knows basics things as dont break scarecrows and fight in bot floor if everybody stays and dont fall he doesnt go back to mid).

1st day: 100 MK runs, lets say a smooth run in MK its 10minutes =

1000/60 = 16.6hrs of game play

2nd day= 70*10= 700/60 = 11.1hrs of gameplay

3rd day= another 16hrs of gameplay.
sums up over: 40+ hrs of gameplay in one dungeon.

that means that still you could have got squat if we go to the pure essence of what RNG means, but some randomg guy 3 runs= the mad moon + the crossing + arachnophobia.

think outside the box dude, you are just digging your own grave with that mindset.

So glad somebody else posted a breakdown. I read that and thought the math was crazy.

And don’t forget, most of the time for this event will have been on work days. I play about 3 hours a day, and in the real world that is a LOT. 16 hours of gameplay in a day, in the same dungeon? That’s either a lie or totally insane.

Personally, I prefer skill to both luck AND grind… but that sentiment seems to have gone out of style.

I’ve put a good 10 hours into this event as well and seen nothing but candycorn and crafting stuff.

Not sure where Anets heads are at, unless of course the purpose of this event is simply to get people to buy things in the store.

I’ve put in multiple hours every day during these events, bought 10 keys with gems, had about 18 saved over 3 characters and saved at least 16 mystery tonics from past chests opened (don’t ask me why I saved them, but I did). So I opened around 30 chests, probably another 15 MK chests, I participated in all the events (although not very long on the PvP ones as I didn’t have much fun with hand-me-down abilities), got most of the achievements, got the Mad King Thorn Memoirs complete edition and ran the Ascend into Madness dungeon at least 20 times.

I think out of this whole event, I got 1 armor drop that had a rune that sold for 30something silver and a recipe for one of the new runes that was priced at 3 silver.

Frankly, I don’t feel bad about practically getting nil, but it’s not easy to still have fun while others have fun AND get cool stuff.

I think what’s worse is that, as the event goes on, more and more people only want level 80s to run the dungeons and most all just want to run it fast as possible.

Basically, the premise of the whole event is tarnished by this random ultra drop that you may or may not get. Not only do people become enslaved to the random, but on a personal level I have less and less fun the more of the same drops I get. Oh, more candy corn, custard and a trick-or-treat bag? Woop…now what can I do with them? Give the candy corn for bags? Okay…-dumps all CC on kids- Wow, more candy corn, custard and some fangs…is this suppose to be fun at some point?

Leo G.4501:

I’ve put in multiple hours every day during these events, bought 10 keys with gems, had about 18 saved over 3 characters and saved at least 16 mystery tonics from past chests opened (don’t ask me why I saved them, but I did). So I opened around 30 chests, probably another 15 MK chests, I participated in all the events (although not very long on the PvP ones as I didn’t have much fun with hand-me-down abilities), got most of the achievements, got the Mad King Thorn Memoirs complete edition and ran the Ascend into Madness dungeon at least 20 times.

I think out of this whole event, I got 1 armor drop that had a rune that sold for 30something silver and a recipe for one of the new runes that was priced at 3 silver.

Frankly, I don’t feel bad about practically getting nil, but it’s not easy to still have fun while others have fun AND get cool stuff.

I think what’s worse is that, as the event goes on, more and more people only want level 80s to run the dungeons and most all just want to run it fast as possible.

Basically, the premise of the whole event is tarnished by this random ultra drop that you may or may not get. Not only do people become enslaved to the random, but on a personal level I have less and less fun the more of the same drops I get. Oh, more candy corn, custard and a trick-or-treat bag? Woop…now what can I do with them? Give the candy corn for bags? Okay…-dumps all CC on kids- Wow, more candy corn, custard and some fangs…is this suppose to be fun at some point?

Describes my experience exactly.

Leo G.4501:

I’ve put in multiple hours every day during these events, bought 10 keys with gems, had about 18 saved over 3 characters and saved at least 16 mystery tonics from past chests opened (don’t ask me why I saved them, but I did). So I opened around 30 chests, probably another 15 MK chests, I participated in all the events (although not very long on the PvP ones as I didn’t have much fun with hand-me-down abilities), got most of the achievements, got the Mad King Thorn Memoirs complete edition and ran the Ascend into Madness dungeon at least 20 times.

I think out of this whole event, I got 1 armor drop that had a rune that sold for 30something silver and a recipe for one of the new runes that was priced at 3 silver.

Frankly, I don’t feel bad about practically getting nil, but it’s not easy to still have fun while others have fun AND get cool stuff.

I think what’s worse is that, as the event goes on, more and more people only want level 80s to run the dungeons and most all just want to run it fast as possible.

Basically, the premise of the whole event is tarnished by this random ultra drop that you may or may not get. Not only do people become enslaved to the random, but on a personal level I have less and less fun the more of the same drops I get. Oh, more candy corn, custard and a trick-or-treat bag? Woop…now what can I do with them? Give the candy corn for bags? Okay…-dumps all CC on kids- Wow, more candy corn, custard and some fangs…is this suppose to be fun at some point?

I think you’re right. What started out as a festive party with pumpkin carving and candy corn mining has turned into a rat race/get rich quick scheme for a relatively small number of lucky people. I find that kind of bewildering and alienating.