Guild Wars 2

I posted this in a Lost Shores forum, but I think it could apply to future events, so I thought I would post it here as well.

The one-time events help create memories for those who participated. Some of these memories are great – tales of several hour-long adventures that culminate in a fanastic reward! Others, however, are tales of woe – adventurers beset by lag and disconnects, ending with a mad dash to a chest that disappears before their very eyes . . . But nonetheless, memories are created.

My idea – take those memories, and recreate them as a one-time fractal! This will no doubt take time to put together, but hear me out. For anyone that participates in a one-time event and cannot receive the rewards (disconnect, lag, chest disappearing), they get mailed an account-bound token (a la the Pact token at the end of your personal story). They take this token to Dessa to be sent back in time to replay the Karka event, and claim the rewards! That way, they still have to “earn” it (mass prizes not sent out through the mail) AND they can enjoy the event mostly lag-free by making it a 5- or 10-man instance, tuned by difficulty, of course. To make it so that token-holders don’t have to run it entirely in a PUG, make it so that a token-holder can create the fractal, but token-holders must also exchange that token at the end to open the chest. If your guild or friends are halfway decent people (and/or have already gotten their rewards), they would still want to help you succeed, and would also get drops, exp, and karma along the way (just not the event chest at the end).

I can’t speak to how Anet tracks completion/participation of these one-time events, but it . . . could . . . work? Maybe? They don’t have to give these tokens to the entire player base, but those that were there and tried, but could not due to technical difficulties. What do you think? This could even be used for future one-time events that have similar participation issues, since the fractals are supposed to be slices of Tyria’s history . . .

Personally, I ran the event (Ancient Karka) a few times, suffering multiple disconnects and was dead to lag a good deal of the time. I didn’t make it to the final leg. I couldn’t even waypoint out! I had to re-log until it put me on an overflow that had an empty field before I could waypoint back to LA. It would be nice to play the event as Anet intended, earning my rewards, instead of just watching it play out as a slideshow on Youtube . . .
Please let me know what you think – feel free to play devil’s advocate and suggest ways to improve the concept!