Guild Wars 2

Electro.4173:

They time the event based on the time when the highest number of players are online. Thats straight from the mouth of the developers on at least 2 occassions that I’ve seen. They look at the data of when the highest number of players is commonly active, and thats the time they set for the events.

Its not favoritism, its a simple issue of catering to a majority

It saddens me hearing people equate “largest number of users online at one time” to “majority of players”. They are NOT the same. ArenaNet has reported peak concurrent users at around 400,000. The player base is over 2 million. When did 20% become a majority of players?

It is pure numbers, but not as you suggest. ANet should look at the data. How many users did not participate. How much money do those users spend on the game after initial purchase. That identifies the income that is potentially at risk designing events that don’t reach those people.

Personally, I have no interest in subsidizing other people’s need to be part of the “special” or “elite” who get to participate in events that are designed to exclude a majority of players. Let’s be honest, that’s also part of what this is about for some of the people who want to keep the events exclusive.

Asum.4960:

No random drop should overvalue months of playing – Period.

This is the exact reason I stopped playing even before Shores of Fail new content was added. And until there are HUGE changes in the “rewards for the time spent playing without exploiting and being legendary lucky” department I am not coming back.

My guild had a group in the final event. All of us are active daily players – all at level 80. We did our best to focus fire as a group and to support players around us. Two hours into the event we reached a crisis. Several of us had to get up early Monday for work/education. Another was in a different time zone and struggling to stay on longer. We discussed what we should do. As anyone who participated knows, the final event was very challenging to play. There was numerous deaths, high repair bills and lag that at one stage affected me by delaying play by a minute from when buttons were pressed. It’s impossible to play when your actions are that far behind your button pressing.

Two hours into the event and some of us had only crab meat as loot. Some had nothing, literally no loot at all. As the loot throughout the entire Lost Shores weekend had been poor relative to say the Halloween events, we believed we were looking at serious repair bills, offset by some crab meat. With the lag and continual disconnects and technical problems, it was not fun to participate. It was heartening to see how the players supported each other and took care of downed players as best they could but overall the event was frustrating and disappointing.

We held a discussion at the two hour point and 4 of us decided, reluctantly that it was not worth our participating longer. That we had obligations for Mondays that were conflicting with what was looking like a particularly late Sunday night. We were disappointed as we had not missed a once only event in GW2 before and had not intended to miss this one. Only one of our group was able to stay behind.

Imagine our amazement the next morning as he showed his two precursors and several other valuable drops. He stayed on for another hour and a half after we were forced to quit. We don’t begrudge him getting a great reward, how he stuck it out for that long I have no idea.

We now have the awkward situation where one of our guild has been given/earnt amazing breathtaking rewards because he was able to stay for another hour and a half to the end. The rest of us did get the large repair bills we were expecting and some crab meat. If we had had the slightest inkling that this particular event was going to generate the biggest rewards ever seen in the game, would we have stuck with it? For the chance of a precursor? Hell yeah!

Ok we have responsibilities and jobs and Monday morning sucks but an hours play for a chance for precursor? It’s a no-brainer. So now we have a guild of jealous (though trying hard not to be) people who feel like chumps for stopping after 2 hours and an embarrassed but thrilled (though trying not to show it too much) member who won the lottery.

As a guild, our members play to escape the hassles of real life and to have fun. Last Sunday night GW2 had plenty of hassle and very little fun.

Well, in my opinion, the event itself was fine. Sure, there were lags, disconnects and more, but that’s hardly avoidable in a one time event. At most I expected a unique title or a special item, that would be it and I would have been fine with it.

The problem is, one of the meta games I play is making money. I don’t grind, never did, it drives me go crazy in about 15 minutes, but I do use professions, trade post and more to generate profit. Not as much as the gold barons, but enough to have a good, steady income. And then suddenly, in comes a champ who opens one random chest and makes more in a mere moment than I do in a month? I can live with lag, bugs, having bad luck with exotics and even rares, but I can’t live with such a huge difference between rewards for the same time invested based on some arbitrary RNG number in a one-time event.

Right now I’m on the edge of abandoning this in favor of going back to EVE. I’m not quite there yet, but it won’t take much more to push me over.

I agree except for your base statement, that GW2 was not about losers and winners before this event.

It always was that way.

People are able to loot pre-cursors: one lucky loot and BAM, they ‘won’ and everyone else lost.

People are able to get insane luck on the Mystic Forge too: one lucky combine and BAM, they ‘won’ and everyone else lost.

It has always been that way.

In fact, this is the only game that I know where this winner-takes-all principle is so extreem. In most games you have a slow progression towards stuff like legendaries.

Here, people that are lucky get thiers for 200g cheaper…

In short: this game has always had a very, very strong lottery element with much higher gains for the lucky few than in other games.

Tallis.5607:

I agree except for your base statement, that GW2 was not about losers and winners before this event.

It always was that way.

People are able to loot pre-cursors: one lucky loot and BAM, they ‘won’ and everyone else lost.

People are able to get insane luck on the Mystic Forge too: one lucky combine and BAM, they ‘won’ and everyone else lost.

It has always been that way.

In fact, this is the only game that I know where this winner-takes-all principle is so extreem. In most games you have a slow progression towards stuff like legendaries.

Here, people that are lucky get thiers for 200g cheaper…

In short: this game has always had a very, very strong lottery element with much higher gains for the lucky few than in other games.

Except it doesn’t cost you anything to open a chest, combined with the fact that chest had a high chance of giving a precursor. In general people waste a LOT of money in the mystic forge. I wouldn’t exactly call it luck getting a precursor after well over 100g of combinations.

Ekove.4586:

ok honestly as long as you looted the chest you won….the minimum you could get out of it is 30g worth of items..the max is 200g or so…if everyone got it it’d ruin the market as well so the random factor has to be there. What upsets me is that some of us didnt get to do it at all and some did it over 3 times, ruining the market ultimately.

Don’t lie man. I open the chest at the end of event and all i make after sold it at trade broker is 1g 80s. So 30g is a dream.

I’m going to paraphrase quotes from the Guild Wars 2 Manifesto video which I believe was released about August 2010…

Mike O’Brien – “A game that defies existing conventions… an opportunity to question everything… a new event system to get people playing together…”

Colin Johanson – “Most games you go out and you have really fun tasks occasionally that you get to do, and the rest of the game is this boring grind to get to the fun stuff… WE JUST DON’T WANT PLAYERS TO GRIND IN GUILD WARS 2, no one enjoys that, no one finds it fun…”

Ree Soesbee – “As a structure, the MMO has lost the ability to make the player feel like a hero, everybody around you is doing the same thing you’re doing, the boss you just killed respawns 10 minutes later… the most important thing in any game should be the player. We have built a game for them.”

For me this smacks of airy-fairy. Although they’re real people explaining real instances that they wanted / didn’t want in this game, almost all of it is contradicted according to the quotes versus what we actually need to do to get anything that is considered decent in this game.

ARENANET, Be the change you want to see in this game. SET THE EXAMPLE

Nowhere do they mention that for best results you have to adapt to the North American timeframes and have exceptionally good luck not only with your chest drops and internet provider’s latency, but even if you make it that far without being booted/dropping connection/lagging out, or my favourite, not even being able to make the event at all, no matter what intentions you had, no matter about the notion of finishing a one-time-only event… you have a life to live as well, and a good deal of us have a job to work. I personally didn’t get to do the final phase of this weekend’s event because I had to work and the event started at about 7am my time. I have integrity and I’m not going to call in sick to play a game. But what I did do was exceptionally buggy and possibly not the best move made to introduce trial accounts for this weekend for a seemingly ill-planned, rushed and (from what we saw in early phases) barely QA’d NPC’s and waiting for events to be fixed. Leave aside the fact that they did manage a work-around solution to enable continuity, the event sequencing needed more time for less bugs and a proper execution.
For people with those trial accounts to see the bugs in the event system happen the way they did, it’s one hell of a first impression to make.

Even the Euro’s would have had a great time of it, they would be playing in the evening their time when the main events for each day’s phases start. Lucky them hey, they also got a localised server so their lag isn’t catastrophic. But for us poor Oceanic’s, we’re the bottom of that barrel. Guild Wars 2 was lucky to even get advertising upon pre-release, but it’s never rated a mention at local conventions like Supernova (oh, hang on, one banner). All we know of Guild Wars 2 down here is that QVS distributes the localised hard copies and that’s about it. We don’t have a server of our own, but we do have a presence. And with this presence comes the largest lag latency to be found anywhere in the world. Tell me how in any way is this fair for a game to be played INTERNATIONALLY?

So people who actually got to play the game are whining that they didn’t get a precursor… it was mentioned that the drop rate was going to be upped and a scavenger hunt implemented to ensure that those super-rare precursor weapons didn’t slip through the hands of those dedicated souls who are working extra-hard and spending heaps on gold to acquire materials through the gem store (most of which requires REAL MONEY PURCHASES), which have escalated in price astronomically thanks to the stomping out of bots. Bear in mind that the precursor weapon is very hard to get your hands on, but if you know anything about making a legendary weapon, it’s only one tiny piece of a much larger picture that has to be assembled, and takes an enormous amount of time for the casual player to actually craft.
But if you did get to play the final event spare one thought for those who missed out on the final phase of the event altogether because they wanted to be there and couldn’t make it. Who knows, it could have been YOUR lucky precursor weapon loot from the chest that escaped your hands because more people were online at the same time and YOU were either kicked from the server or that person made off with your super-valuable loot. The shoe suddenly switches feet.

My 2c * clink *.. spend wisely.

-V-

I like your post, bro. Sums up my feelings pretty well. I’ve been kind of upset lately due to the decisions made for this event so maybe I haven’t been posting in a constructive manner.

But yes I strongly agree that if they want more precursors into the market to lower the price.. that they should have done it in some other manner that all players can participate in (I heard something about them making some quest to get one). Giving out precursors in a one time event really is a slap to the face to the people who couldn’t make it. They reduced the cost of precursors the wrong way.

My wife has played everyday since the game’s release, she has been great at saving up money, buying character slots, extra banks slots using in game money, and has been saving up for her first Legendary weapon. After we got D/C due to the lag during the main event, and not being able to get back in (we had login issues to the forum and the game) she resigned herself to not being able to participate in the event, and then she found out that people, some had trial accounts, had just gotten legendary precursors. It was heart breaking to see her reaction. I had to drag her back into the game yesterday, just to try and “get her to get back on the horse”.

I never expected Anet with GW2 to create that many losers and winners with such a massive difference between the 2. Not rewarding people who had done all the weekend events leading upto this finale and handing out massive rewards to trial accounts, think how many gold farmers there could have been with all those trial accounts

I was and currently am, very disappointed with how Anet handled this whole event, and I would not blame my wife at all for not wanting to play.

To add my thoughts, I was also very surprised that the weapons dropped were Legendary weapons, when all the talk for the last few weeks before this was about the new Ascended gear.

well, they had to fix the ridiculous TP prices for precursors after they patched the r65 rares “exploit” and bring em down to something like 100ish g per.

Something had to happen and clearly this was the wrong way to go about it. As someone else said, luck and gold farmers with multiple accounts/characters came on top of legitimate players who invest a lot of their time to farm for something like a legendary.

Tbh i am not bothered even thought i got served a big bowl of d/c at the event. I still got long way to go with crafting the different gifts and clovers in particular associated with legendaries, however I had made a conscious decision at the start that I d leave the precursor for last, considering all the screw ups and the uncertain/luck based way of obtaining it.

On the other hand, I truly feel sorry for anyone that spent over 200-300g for a precursor in the past couple of weeks. Some of these guys could be your most dedicated fans Anet and you are screwing them over again and again.

Take careful notice how everyone who does ‘not’ support this thread lack any cohesive argument and some of them can’t even spell.

They are the ’looser’s’ if you ask me :P

Back on topic, I agree with OP and hope something is done to remedy the situation.

Good point OP .
I passed from being the guy defending ArenaNet from the mad at ‘em one , and obviously the people in my guild always crying about the game being bad and played just because there isn’t an alternative had 200G worth drops while me and my girlfriend just crap ( she could not even log in ) .
Now this is the biggest problem to me , is not about precursor price droping , i don’t really care about legendary , it is the value of a precursor .
You can’t give so different rewards to people doing the same one time event ( another
stupid thing , support for people in Asia and Oceania ) .
This is not a lottery or a gamble , nor a dungeon or a mystic forge precursor attempt .
I feel like i don’t want to support this game anymore .
Sorry for the rant .