I want to start off by saying that I love the invasions. Having such massive events over an entire zone with tons of players is really cool.
But both of the times I’ve participated in these invasions I encountered a problem. The first time was in Blazeridge Steppes. I was running around doing portal events like normal, but when I was trying to complete a MA event I crashed. Now, I had been doing this for longer than ten minutes so I couldn’t get back into an invasion server. So, what could I do? Nothing. There is so much player traffic in these events you can’t get back to the main map. I just had to wait and when it ended because I had crashed I got zero rewards. Nothing.
The second time was even worse. This invasion was in Harathi Hinterlands. I got there quickly and started helping out. My server was doing pretty well at clearing it and with 4 minutes left we had less than half in both bars and I’m pretty certain that we were going to do it. Then guess what? I crashed. For 41 minutes of me running around and helping I didn’t get the reward at the end. I couldn’t get back to the main map and that was that.
I think this leads to a big problem with this type of event.
Just imagine that Person A did this event for 10 minutes and then left and did other things. They will get their reward. If Person B does this event for 10 minutes and then logs out for 5 minutes, logs back in and does other stuff. They will not get their reward for doing this event. Why? There is no reason why Person B does not get a reward but Person A does.
And it isn’t just me. I saw a post in this forum yesterday saying that because of this occurrence They would complete one portal event and then wait in a corner so as to not crash and get the reward. To me this is really disheartening, I want to log in and do some invasions but what if this keeps happening?
Now, onto my suggestions( I’m not sure if these are possible just what I hope could be done)
First, that if someone crashes when in a specific overflow or in the main map their “spot” is held for 5 minutes. If they do not reconnect in this time it would continue the way it does now.
Second, if someone disconnects but has participated in an event their participation is still counted and rewards will be handed out, whether they are online or not.
I do think that some solution must be found if Arenanet plan to do more massive open world content like this with good rewards(which I hope they do)
That’s all I really have to say on the matter.
/wall of text over