Guild Wars 2

I was talking to my husband after seeing all the negativity on the forums. A little backstory before my suggestion:

We were able to attend the event. It was very laggy, culling was bad, everyone dying left and right to things we couldn’t see. I leveled up my achievement “No One Left Behind” from all the rezzing I did. We did get the chest at the end. We did get exotics, rares, and the 20 slot. We did not get precursors. We had a guildie dc. He was able to get back on luckily. We were glad we were able to make it and we do feel bad for those who were not and for those who disconnected.

My suggestion for future “one time events” is this:

The event occurs over the course of 1-2 days every 4 or 6 hours, whichever is deemed as best. This makes the event either available 6 times a day or 4 respectively. You would get an achievement that would be account wide for completing the event. You could run it as many times as you like but would only receive credit and loot once.

This would give all parts of the world an opportunity to participate. This would give those who missed out or dc’d another shot at doing it. Having the account achievement would keep people from running it and looting multiple times or taking alts and getting more than their share. Having several opportunities to do it might help with the lag and overloaded servers and guildies and friends not being able to get in the same overflows.

I really like this game. I am not crazy about the addition of a gear treadmill. I do love the new fractals. The event itself (if we pretend it was smooth) was actually pretty amazing. The concept was really good, the implementation was just incredibly rocky. I hate to see all of the negativity. I would like the game to continue as I refuse to go back to WoW and the other games I have tried just did not hold my interest for long since DAoC. That is why I am making this suggestion and I hope it is considered by the dev’s.

Doing this stuff multiple times, but limiting the loot to a one-off is a great suggestion. I have said as much in another thread, myself.

Because this current environment can’t be allowed to continue. It’s totally discriminatory against people in Australia, for one example, where it’s already Monday morning if you’re doing something later on a Sunday in the US.

And, not even that, when not even people in the “right” timezone get to do it, clearly there needs to be a better way. For a game which was meant to pride itself on being customer-centric, it’s been doing all it can to annoy customers for months now.

Remember that frog NPC in Metrica which took weeks… WEEKS… to fix? Aye carumba. What sort of customer services was that?

Really annoyed at ANet right now and I’m supposed to be a fanboi…!!!

My husband is Australian and we are moving back there next year so yeah, I get ya on the timezone thing!

On the one hand, I can see the appeal of an event that only happens one time; it adds a bit of “specialness” to the game world to have a boss or event that actually stays gone once players manage to kill it. (Anyone who naively thought they could really clear out Gnomeregan in the old WoW days will understand how silly it can feel when the thing you just killed immediately pops back to life again.) And, occasionally, I believe some things should be “special”, even though the act of being so will inevitably exclude people who wish to be included.

However, I definitely agree that events such as this one should repeat for at least some amount of time so that more people (specifically those in other time zones, as you’ve mentioned) can have a chance to participate. Repeating the event over the course of one or two days shouldn’t drastically affect the “one-time-only” feel of it but could go a long way toward keeping players happy, so I think this suggestion is a good one.

My feeling is that if they want to make some “Big Bad” for people to kill as a one-off… fine… but don’t hand out stupidly over the top rewards for it.

Let the act of killing the Big Bad, and “being there” be the actual reward.

Otherwise we’re left with this situation where people are showing off great loot and, how did they get it? Did they do something skillful? Are they better GW2 gamers than me? Well… no… it just means they showed up at a time I couldn’t.

And that’s a POOR reason to get great loot.

Having the event repeat several times over the course of a few days would help accommodate people with busy real life schedules or in different time zones, but there is another group of people who need to be considered. The Lost Shores patch introduced some bugs that made the game unplayable for a lot of people – for me, the client crashes as soon as I log in. Extending the duration of the event won’t help us, because we’re locked out of the game until ANet gets around to fixing the bugs that are causing our crashes.
For the benefit of everyone who misses the scheduled occurrence, I think these one-time events should be available at the player’s convenience, in the style of a personal story mission, acquired from a specific NPC. This version of the event could be framed as a flashback to the actual event, and the NPC could be called a “chronicler” or “historian” or something. As Pochibella suggested, there could be an achievement or a flag on our accounts or characters to indicate when we have completed the event once, and after that either we no longer have access to replay that event or we just don’t get any rewards from replaying it.