Guild Wars 2

I wanted to enjoy this, alot.
You can carve pumpkins, you can eat candy, you can trick or treat on ghastly doors, you can have new jumping puzzles and the Mad King… So many things!
The world looks amazing.

It should have been perfect. It felt like it would be.

Then it happened, as I was grinding out (oops, did I use that word?) candy corn, I realized this isn’t fun. I was in denial because I wanted it to be wonderful. This is actually in some ways worse than no event at all.
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There are some interesting things, aesthetically. What will I be left with for this event though?

Barely anything at all.
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The weapon skins:

They are on a four hour time limit and cost an unholy amount of candy corn for a temporary item.

The ones from the chest apparently have a horrible chance of success, and even then you have to assume you probably won’t get the one you are trying to get, if you get any weapon or armor skin at all.

Someone posted that they had used 20 black lion chests and had no halloween item drop.

LETS DO SOME MATH -20 black lion chests keys (assuming you have enough chests) would cost you about 30 dollars USD.

Now, lets assume you want a few of the halloween costumes.. that adds another 20-30 dollars.

Most other mmo have much easier to get items with reliable quest ways of obtaining them for these holiday events. They also might have a monthly fee (or not).
However, I read somewhere that six month subs to some of them might be in the area of 60-80 dollars. However, the celebration is a celebration, not a gambling house.

If I total up the 30 + 30 and leave room for other micro transactions which are likely to happen during this event.. we edge very close to that six month subscription.

Am I being suckered? Sure, I pay 60 dollars and have no subscription fee, but all the good content costs just as much as a sub fee and possibly worse while the sub fee practically guarantees that the company … well..

A sub fee guarantees that the company has to make its customers happy after they buy the game.

There, I said it.

You might say its optional to have those weapon skins. Yes, it is.. but they are leaps and bounds ahead of even legendary content. A necromancer with a scythe? A chainsaw sword? Of course we will want it.

Perhaps we can buy it through the trading post? However… its 55 gold on the trading post. To be honest, most players aren’t online long enough or lucky enough to get such things easily.. and by the time they get that much gold, the price will go higher.

In other words, its unreachable for me and others like me. I understand when a legendary weapon requires work that it should be expensive. However, an item that is meant to be a festival item should be accessible.

Ok, I tried to overlook that kind of stuff though, I’m reasonable. I’m a reasoning, understanding person. Nearly every halloween quest is broken. I can’t get the ghost girl to spawn and noone else in Lions Arch can either. We have every other book and we can’t get the quest reward.
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I still want to enjoy this but I find it impossible. Can anyone tell me how I am supposed to find this fun and not nerve wrecking or upsetting when I see that warrior who got lucky on his first black lion chest with a great chainsword or the necro with a scythe? In a month, I will have no chance at these items and frankly they outclass any legendary in my opinion. Pure luck determines whether we get the exact weapons we want at all? What if we didn’t have much time to play during these events?

Halloween is my favorite holiday but this isn’t enjoyable for me.. Its grueling.
You get a sickening feeling when you realize that something is out of your reach simply because you aren’t lucky and the devs want to make a quick buck after launch instead of building the community by being all inclusive. Its like Trick R Treating in a small town where noone celebrates it. No candy, no hope. Empty handed.

Its not inclusive, if there was a difficult but direct approach to this (getting permanent items) that didn’t cost heaps more than other mmo (WoW) altogether, that would be “making us work for it”.

A random number generation is not friendly. A black lion chest isn’t a reward, it is a cold emotionless casino that is content to say to someones celebratory joy: Nope, not for you, you don’t get to have fun. Maybe someone else will. No candy for you kid, try the next door for 20 $ USD.

Black Lion chest for limited time content celebration such as this.. is in my opinion inherently, vehemently:
Wrong.

Very very well said. I love Halloween. It’s my favorite holiday. ArenaNet has always done a wonderful job around this time of year…. Until this one. The decorations are splendid, the atmosphere is perfect. The costume brawls are amusing for 10-15 minutes. Then you start to look around for the treats and realize things aren’t as nice as you had hoped. I don’t have the funds to pour into a game, let alone anything else lately, so I need to work for all my treats. This does not bode well if I want any lasting weapons, as my luck has always been terrible with such things, and I refuse to shell out even 6 silver for a weapon skin that will only last me 4 hours. I still have (admittedly mostly useless) weapons in my bank from the old Wintersday celebrations and cherish them because they’re fun. Hell, I still have my first pumpkin head from the very first Halloween… in armor form! Why hold out a carrot on a stick, then whack me on the nose with the stick and throw the carrot even further away? This is a great way to QUICKLY lose a loyal fan who has loved the Guild Wars games since GW1 first came out. I would love to include constructive criticism, but words fail me. I know It sounds like the only reason I’m disappointed is that I’ll likely never get a weapon, but it’s a whole lot more than that. I play games for FUN. Things like pumpkin carving were fun… for the first 45 times or so… after that it became grind, and when I realized I don’t even know IF there’s a reward for carving 100 or however many pumpkins I just stopped almost altogether. However, if the game as a hole continues to be less and less fun like I sincerely wanted it to be, I will eventually wander off and find my own fun outside the game. That saddens me, because I played the first Guild Wars for something like 5 years, and I wanted badly for that to continue. In truth, this attitude is caused by more than just Halloween, but that’s the current focus right now. I can only Hope things will turn around.

I was hoping for a Halloween Costume I could buy, and I got that so that made me happy. Aside from that, I was really looking foward to making my own Halloween staff, even if I couldn’t use it yet. I just saved up my first 1 gold the other day, and I spent that on my second traits book. I don’t see how I’ll ever be able to make that staff now, and it’s very dissappointing. I still like everything else, but really…..I’ve made special holiday event weapons and gear in other games before, I’d just assumed I could do this one as well.

sad but true. this whole event feels like one big kitten grind fest to me.

new jumping puzzle are good, lion’s arch is awesome, quaggans running around in costumes are so adorable. but (there always one, eh?). to get any good item like skin for a weapon or amor, actual weapon you need to GRIND or to trow rl-money in game, and no, 20 bucks wont be enough.

its just plain wrong. i was hyped very much for this event, but it feels like a chore.

You make some good points, but I think you’re overreacting a bit when you say:
“but all the good content costs just as much as a sub fee”

You actually consider the Black Lion Chest skins to be ALL the good content? Even if we limit ourselves to this patch alone there have been new dynamic events, jumping puzzles and an open world dungeon added that isn’t even related to halloween and it’s free.

In context of Halloween you can do pretty much anything for free or cheap. I’m sorry the event (which still has 3 acts to go) is bugged for you, but I’m sure they’ll fix it by the time it’s over, after all, it hasn’t even been the first day yet. Although I don’t see how that translates into “nearly every halloween quest is broken”.

I should clarify:

The insinuation is that there will likely be other holiday events and similar which would be free or vastly easier in those mmo. More often than every 6 months. You fully enjoy the game with that fee (I prefer guild wars 2 obviously), but in the scope of the game it is enjoyed. However, to enjoy the events and everything “fully” as in get even the basic perks of the seasons… you have to shell out more than that fee. I am not defending fees so much as pointing out that something is completely imbalanced.
In other words, guild wars 2 might as well be a sub game or worse monetarily or time wise for people who want to experience the entirety of the content. People can of course miss the content and not pay a penny, but the game developer was quoted as saying that people do not enjoy grinds and they did not want it in their game. A holiday event seems hardly the place to encourage us to grind or put hefty sums of $ into the system. I feel they should be focusing on building the community, rather. Word of mouth sales are determined by trust, and if we are to compete with the other mmo, we need to understand how things are working, really. In order for trust to exist, things like these random chance skins (which are clearly better than most of the other skins to encourage you to want them) need to be minimized. Ask yourselves one moment, why wasn’t necro allowed other staff scythe skins by default in the game? This question perplexed me.. then it hit me when this event came out.

Let me direct your attention to many real world retailers which make a majority of their sales during the holiday seasons… Its possible to bank on it if you want money. Holiday sales are huge. I am not saying they are greedy, I am saying its a decision that comes off very badly to the player base when they could be focusing on other things than micro transactions. First establish player base, content, trust.. then do that sort of thing. At the very least they could humor us by allowing us to buy the skins directly off of the marketplace so we don’t “lose all bets” and let our wallets die from random number generating boxes.

The quests were very buggy at the time (apparently it has been patched finally, that was alot quicker than I am used to my storyline bugs being fixed). There were at least three different bugs that disallowed progression as well as portals which spat out endless monsters which botters have already exploited. This disrupts the economy and will cause further imbalance.

55 Gold is too much for most players to make easily and the alternative (black lion chests) can sometimes end up setting people back the gold equivalent of 30-40 dollars. It just doesn’t seem free or cheap.

I am in Arah and have tried farming various things for gold and thats still way too much money to be a viable halloween reward. I might not use the best farming tactics, but it doesn’t seem I do much worse than most people I speak to.

My further sympathy goes to lower level players who bought the game before Halloween in order to participate. It seems that a great deal of the content is simply not accessible to them (without heavy real world USD, 30-40 dollars is very close to the cost of a new game) unless they have the money skills of an investment banker.

I hope that clarifies.

More people being mad about RNG from the chests. Having bugs in the quests is kind of sucky but they seemed to have fixed that within a few hours.

This patch is HUGE stop staring at the one small part you dont like on the FIRST DAY of the event.

Also I am willing to bet that we will all be getting items from the event come the end of the quest chains.

fyi, I opened 130 chests and I got nothing. Perhaps you should edit the values used in your calculations.

Spending that kind of money, I would feel entitled to a skin of sorts. But nope. I am truly disappointed in this RNG system.

And I really agree with ya. GW2 is a great game, and events like this shouldn’t be dictated by a gambling/RNG system.

GW2 really does make players work for their items. Point in case would be the shield/bow/staff you could buy for a limited time with corn. Have you seen the amount of money it would take to craft the permanent items…?

While it may give a gamer a sense of accomplishment achieving a rare event weapon like this, most gamers will hardly get the chance to experience it. Yes, skins are optional. But it does seem that they’re only exclusive to the really lucky ones and the hardcore ones.

130? Hows that invisible new graphics card treating you?

I’m deeply.. deeply sorry. Hope your luck improves. That sounds just awful. Lots of cash or the equivalent.

I want to know whatever happened to the G-A-M-E portion of games, you know, the fun portion. This grinding stuff has gotten way out of hand, and the money grubbing for items just isn’t Limburger.

I know right, Sahfur.

I might as well have spent the money on getting gold, to use in the Trading Post to get the skins. (As one of the Reds mentioned).

I really am speechless at the moment haha. Hope you guys have better luck than I do! And oh, opened the chests with MF items + Boost kitten chests drop them when I don’t need it) + Food. Maximised my chances, but nah.

yeah this sucks, i mean it’s almost like its only a quarter of the event or something.