So these were the two big events of this games first year of release. I think we should all look at these both and take a few things away from it.
Halloween seemed to be more fun and more entertaining than Lost Shores. Why? A few reasons
Lost shores relied on combat dynamic events that involved entire servers. This caused major lag and those instances where enemies and players would become invisible.
The last part of the shores event (The one today) was probably the most complained about. IT took 2.5 hours of standing there attacking, dieing, respawning, and just rather tedious activities. Something I Suggest you, anet, do is that you realize how you made spells in this game. Many of the spells are AoE and have all these flashy animations, this causes huge lag spikes because you have just a supernova of colors and animations in this big events. You need to create these special events based upon how you designed the game.
Now to the suggestion part on events.
1. You hype it up, you make sure there was a reason. We’re spear heading an ancient race of giant crabs. You need to make it feel epic and it needs to be rewarding, Following someone around and having these places all of a sudden just spawn (like wayponts) or just killing karka over and over again isn’t very epic rewarding and felt overhyped. The rewards were great there, but they had flaws. I will go into those next.
2. The rewards. They are based around random and luck. This causes some people to be happy and others to be angry. Spent 2.5 hours playing, you got 2 epics worth about 3g while another player gets epics that are worth close to 100g. It is these type of rewards that make people made because the other player who just made 100g didn’t do anything diffferent, anything better, etc. There is no way for the players to control what they get, this leads to frustration and anger amongst players who aren’t being or feeling rewarded for playing for 2.5 hours. How can we fix this? Event unique special rewards that players can choose between. They are soulbound on acquire. They will have a choice of every stat combination they want and the items have a special unique look that was specific for that one time event.
So the game would detect that your this class. It then gives you a choice between different weapons with the unique look that the class can use or they can choose a piece of armor.
3. Events should be fun. Being with 50+ other people and lagging like crazy is not fun. Make these special events like Guild Wars 1. It will put you into a instance with a certain amount of other people. It would adjust the difficulty based on how many (so if the instance doesnt get filled, it is still doable). It wouldn’t be too many people that it would cause lag, this means it is about 10x as fun.
4. The jumping puzzle, although hard, was very fun. It was a nice little game to have fun with. These one time events and content updates should be fun and not this hard battles in which you die a lot. if you want to do these battles, you need to adjust the difficulty and make them instance to avoid causing a huge amount of lag.
Those are mostly my suggestions on these type of events.
Thank you for reading.