Guild Wars 2

Quite a hot topic right now but that’s to be expected if you’re rolling out high level rewards. If you really cannot think of any other ways to get one-time events to play fairly for everyone, let’s see how other places do it:

GW1 – Apparently “One time events” repeat every 3 hours for 24 hours giving people the chance to do it regardless of timezone. Just make it that the account can only do it once.

Mabinogi – New quest lines are given to each player and they can do it whenever they choose, but only once as the lead. Ofcourse you can party up to help others complete their quest lines which (especially in later ones) holds great benefit to the helpers too, encouraging people to help each other. Limited-time quests range from one week to one month, leaving not much room for anyone to say they couldn’t do it.

Ultima Online – Very old school and very GM hands on. On the shard I was helping out on, sure there were one time events for the USA – but at the same time there were one time quest chains happening for other timezones too, all smaller pieces of a bigger picture. C’mon, if we could get it to work here I’m sure you can do something similar.

GW2 Mad King – Hey guess what, it was awesome because it kinda followed GW1. You had ample time to run up the clock tower, explore the labyrinth, pvp in wierd places, beat up (and then dance) with the mad king too! Fun! Sure, some people missed a cutscene but as you saw on the forums, that was quite ok with everyone.

If your team really cannot work a way to do any of the above you can either hire new people (ouch! Just kidding! They are good! Please don’t drop a cow on me! :P) or simply run your subsequent one-time events for different timezones. Yes I know you were catering for your largest concurrency. That’s nice. The problem is if you keep catering to them exclusively then you will continue to not cater for everyone else.

Make the next one on Europe prime-time, then the one after Oceania ([cough] and hand out legendaries on this one [cough] [shifty eyes]), or whatever. I can guarantee we’ll forgive you for running more one time events on your most busy periods as long as the rest of us aren’t forgotten.