Hello there,
I’ve been playing this MMORPG since the second beta weekend event in 2012 and to this day I still pop in and find something to do for varying amounts of time. I could logout minutes later to do something else with my time or spend a huge chunk of hours doing whatever interests me. I find that dailies and renewable goals are a huge motivator for me to come back and finish before they reset.
But that’s not why I’m making this thread with the request I want to make.
To this day I don’t have a legendary weapon. Personally I don’t like most legendary skins and find some of the simpler skins more appealing. Plus, I can get the same stats on an ascended weapon which is significantly easier to craft. But I’m glad we can craft the precursor now and I might even change all of this and go for the legendary shield someday, but I certainly wouldn’t come back to the game to craft a precursor or a more complex ascended weapon with interchangeable stats. Collections are nice, I’m glad they’re in the game and I say they changed the game for the better, but collections do not challenge me. Collections are there to give incentive and reward people’s efforts for completing them but.. what happens after you complete them? They’re done, gone forever.
What do you do then?
Collecting skins isn’t for everyone. Someone might love legendary weapons or the expensive weapons from the Mystic Forge but to others they’re not worth the effort or do not look appealing at all. What happens to those people? What about those who aren’t able to raid weekly or on a consistent basis?
ArenaNet has taken a long time between living story seasons to focus on other parts of the game, leaving the playerbase to float about with limited reasons to login. Content droughts aren’t nice and I think bringing back a few festivals like the Super Adventure Box, Wintersday, and Halloween will help the longevity of the game.
I have a friend who hasn’t played in the Super Adventure Box until last month and they fell in love with it. The aesthetic, how they had to learn the routes to complete the Tribulation versions of all the levels, how they were rewarded for doing so, learning how the bosses functioned, and the Super Adventure Box even had furniture coins that reset on a daily timer.. it challenged people. Like a mixture between a minigame and a jumping puzzle, it catered to people who liked jumping puzzles. SAB was longer than regular jumping puzzles out in the overworld and rewarded the player better. It has a story too, one that they want to see finished someday.
It was fun. It’s a festival of sorts that will come back next year. It’s repeatable.
So it dawned on me.
Why not tweak the other festivals to pop in and entertain people as a means to dissipate the boredom that comes from a lack of updates? Between big updates?
I’m talking about:
- Dragon Bash
- The Queen’s Jubilee/Gauntlet
- The Labyrinthine Cliffs
- Dragon Bash was like a mixture between Halloween and the Lunar New Year festival that took its place but more centered around celebrating the mortality of the elder dragons and the successful fights against them.
- The Queen’s Jubilee/Gauntlet or what is listed as “Queen Jennah’s Coronation Day” catered to people who like social zerg events and 1v1 boss battles. It challenged people and rewarded them with prestige as well as money and recipes.
- The Labyrinthine Cliffs, though now lacking a Zephyr Sanctum, was a very beautiful area. Surely it can be repurposed to act as a zone for another festival? There was a lot of trade going on at that part of Tyria so it must have some significance even after the Zephyr Sanctum’s demise.
It’s also worth noting that bringing these festivals back can act as an outlet for discontinued items, skins, and consumables that were associated with them or currently cannot make their way back into the game without rare events like Mordremoth’s Minions Invade Tyria
I feel bringing back these festivals and spreading them out throughout summer and spring will help bring people back into the game to check them out and provide a breath of fresh air. A time to settle down from the normal routine with something that only comes briefly once a year. May take some effort to tweak/update them to a presentable state, like SAB, but it feels like a worthy investment for years to come. Who doesn’t want to celebrate a little every so often?