I, like many people, had a lot of problems with the Lost Shores event. I think a lot of it was great on paper, but the execution needed a lot of work. Like many people, I did not get any rewards at the end and was disappointed to see the rewards were so overwhelmingly good, especially after my 3+ hours of participation. Here’s what you did right and what you did wrong:
What you did right on paper was a large, world altering event. I love it in theory. In practice though, I ended up spamming 1 because I couldn’t see the mobs for a large percentage of the event. They just weren’t drawn on the screen. This is a recurring problem in wvw and in all honesty, you guys should have known this would be a problem with an event of this scale.
What you did right on paper is huge, massively difficult bosses. In practice, they ended up being overly tedious, particularly the “reinforcements” phases of the ancient. The parts where we had to break open the geysers or cause the rock slide were good, although I think a little more depth to those types of stages would have been better. The reinforcements though… they were overly long and ended up being no fun whatsoever.
What you did right on paper were large objectives that required large groups to work together to complete. In practice, I think I got 6 or 7 Karka kills the whole time. I just couldn’t get enough hits in on anything to register a kill without running ahead of the pack, which invariably meant something dropped on my head and insta killed me. Again, I’m not sure if this was a rendering issue or if that’s just how the mobs popped, but it wasn’t fun. It was tedious and frustrating.
What you did right on paper were big rewards for large events. In practice, I’m frustrated because I didn’t get anything. 3 hours of frequently frustrating events and no payoff is upsetting. Toward the end, I was seeing 1-minute plus lag. I couldn’t even participate at that point. I was just watching things play out in front of me and hoped something didn’t aggro me 45 seconds ago and kill me that I wouldn’t know about for another 15 seconds. At this point I had put around 3 hours in and I couldn’t participate, so I gave up. I tried relogging only to keep seeing one minute’s worth of lag, so I just quit. I had given enough of my Sunday afternoon to an otherwise un-fun event, so I just left. I’m half frustrated that I didn’t stay because the rewards were so good, but at the same time my technical problems were so bad at that point, I can’t even be sure I would have been rewarded had I stayed.
Again, you guys did a lot right on paper and I like that you’re trying it. But honestly, you should have known about the rendering issue. You should have known that the “trial weekend” was only going to aggravate that situation. You should have had an idea that a one-time pickup event chest at the end was going to cause problems for people who ran into technical hurdles during the event.
I love your game and I won’t stop recommending it to friends, but a lot of the problems during the event you really should have known were going to happen. If you’re going to do something huge like this, you need to do it in instances until you work out lag and rendering issues which are commonplace in WvW.
Thanks again for making a great game and trying to make a great event. Sorry it didn’t work out.