Guild Wars 2

I joined in the final phase a bit late but was able to get into a group with a few guildies actually fighting that Ancient Karka.

What I experienced was major lag, inability to rez and almost all my arrows never made it to the target.

I kept trying to rez folks but every time I clicked F I would start to bend down only to stand right back up and unable to rez.

Did not see what killed me. One second I had a clear view of the boss, next moment I am down fighting for my life. Only had to way point once as something actually worked oddly enough to help me get up most of the times I did go down.

95% of all my arrow hits were either “Obstructed” or “out of range” for some unknown reason. From my view point nothing was in my way and I was close enough to have some of my arrows actually strike the boss…then immediately show as “out of range” before hitting again.

I really feel this entire event was poorly deployed. From the conversations I overheard, my guild mates said there were no drops or if there were, it was crab meat or shells.

So many folks at the end of the fight did not make it to the chest in time for the loot. I was fortunate to obtain my loot, so I immediately started to look for folks to rez. Considering the lag that was a bit problematic even after the event was finished.

But of course only a couple of items I got were usable by my character. The rest I will have to vendor or see if I can sell it on the BLTP to earn something from it.

What ever happened to “When it’s ready?”

A brief summary of my old post.

One-time events are obviously not the optimum way to present content in your game.

— Trying to hit maximum concurrent users resulted in unplayability for many.
— Excluding a portion of your playerbase is never a good idea. The fastest way to turn people off your game is to exclude them for a reason out of their control (work, real life obligations, location, etc.).
— Running a hyped up event while simultaneously opening free trials results probably wasn’t the best idea for multiple reasons, namely server strains and bad first impressions.
— Please open a public test server for stress testing and better QA.
— Please don’t underestimate the size of your playerbase, or overestimate the integrity of your servers.
— Don’t let yourselves be rushed, please. More than anything, this entire event smacked of hasty work. The storytelling was disjointed, especially for people who could not attend the one time events, as NPCs referenced people and occurrences that had taken place earlier. The one time event structure itself seems like a much easier way out than making a dungeon or otherwise instanced content — which likely would have reduced the amount of bugged NPCs and lag, and would have allowed for better story flow.

I guess that’s all I have to say.

I love you guys, I really do. And I love your game. But this event wasn’t particularly fun or well-implemented, even though the rewards at the end were great (I didn’t get a precursor or anything, but the 20-slot box alone made it worth it for me). I’m not going to reiterate all of the stuff that went wrong, because I’m sure you’re already aware, but at the risk of sounding like an armchair developer, I have a few suggestions.

1) Don’t make event stuff dependent on actual DEs. DEs break, and the Lost Shores content broke in the same way regular open-world DEs have been breaking since release. It’s taken weeks to fix some of that stuff. The Halloween scavenger hunts didn’t seem to have the same issues, probably because most of them only required talking to an NPC, rather than depending on them triggering an event. People also had several days to do the first phase of the Halloween content.

2) Southsun is gorgeous. Probably the most beautiful zone in the game. It could easily be a farmer’s paradise with some increased loot drops to make it a good replacement for Cursed Shore, since the enemies are much harder and better drops would be completely justified. Right now, the best rewards seem to come from running Fractals, which is great for people who love dungeons and not so awesome for those of us who don’t. I do enjoy the Fractals, but I can’t run them very often. GW2 often reminds me of things I enjoyed about FFXI, but one thing I didn’t enjoy about FFXI—the reason I quit, in fact—was that eventually SquareEnix nerfed every method for farming in the game so that players were only really rewarded by running high-end group content.

3) I think the gem store is being steered in the wrong direction. This update gave us two things to buy, neither of which were particularly interesting. I mentioned this in another thread, but the problem with putting so much emphasis on the gambling chests is that those of us who dislike RNG will just buy the skins they drop from the TP, when we might have purchased them directly if they’d been offered. You could make them unable to be sold, and it’s generous of you to let people resell them, but there is a serious lack of things to buy for those of us who just want to fling money at you and get something in hand. Most of it is the standard gimmicky/silly cash shop stuff like bunny ears and crazy hats, but at least in most games those things can be worn any time. I would love it if you updated the gem store more frequently, with a wider variety of items; what happened to the Scholar set that was in the BWEs, or the first version of the Pirate outfit?

4) There’s been a lot of mystery and lore hinted at surrounding the karka, but the events on the island and the surrounding storyline seem to revolve completely around the, uh, kitten-ups of the Consortium and the efforts of the Lionguard to restrain themselves from throttling them while fighting the crabs. Defeating the Ancient Karka and attacking the hive also doesn’t appear to have had any effect on the karka population of Southsun, despite the stated purpose of the event being “take control of the island from the karka.” The karka still pretty much run the place; it is Karkasville, North Karkland, population: karka, primary export: karka bits, motto: “Please take some karka home to the wife—we had so much this year.” Obviously there still need to be karka there to fight, but the island post-event is exactly the same as the island pre-event, as far as I can tell. Same events, same mob distribution, same giant enemy crabs.

5) I’m not flipping out about Ascended gear, but I really liked the fact that max-stat gear was fairly easily attainable and the rest was customization (both visual and setting up the perfect stats and runes for a given build). I really think you should just leave it at backpieces and rings. You already had sort of a mid-tier between exotic and legendary in the form of very difficult-to-forge exotics like Mjolnir and Foefire’s Power, but the problem is that Ascended gear seems about that hard to get, but has a stat increase. The biggest issue with those items to begin with was that the only way to get them was farming gold, so I think you could have fixed the “tier gap” issue by creating more ways to get interesting skins.

6) I love the Colossus fractal. Beautiful area, fun mechanics, and one of the most touching moments I’ve ever seen in a video game. Way to make players actually feel like big kitten heroes. I cannot give your team enough praise for that final moment.

Thank you for everything, and for listening to our feedback. I know you guys work hard, and I’m looking forward to your future plans regardless. Sorry to hear the previous thread got eaten—this weekend just won’t quit. :P

Arenanet. You’ve read all the criticisms. Many of you experienced the issues for yourselves. It was a mess of bugs and poor design decisions and hopefully you guys will do everything necessary to ensure no events go down like that ever again!

For me, this is the bullet list of lessons to take from this event.

• Quality Assurance Testing. Where was it for this event? The multitude of bugs are as big a failure for your QA process as they are for game design and programming. Public test Server? Yes please.

• No more weekend only events. No more one day phases. No more one time events. Don’t do it. You alienate many more players than you please.

• No more events with tons of enemies swarming the screen. The servers handled a hundred players fine, but a hundred players plus a couple dozen mobs? Server lag to the extreme. If the servers can’t handle it, don’t design it.

• No more events that take 3 to 3 1/2 hours to complete! The rewards, for those that were not cheated of them were ok. The 20 slot container, for people that look at the 13 Gold price for 20 slots on the TP and wonder if they will ever, ever be able to afford one, was a nice reward. The random mix of rares and exotics was ok. It says a lot about how frustrating the long slog of a laggy event actually was that many were unsatisfied with the rewards!

• No more one run events. Ever. It just isn’t fair to most of your players. The persistent idea that peak time scheduling equals “fair and inclusive” has been flawed all along, going all the way back to stress test timings during beta. The logic is flawed and it ticks a lot of people off. No one cares if a single run “makes more sense for the story”. Repeats for people who play off peak is good. Events that can be completed over the course of a week at each players own pace are even better.

• Game designers and programmers. Most of us are scratching our heads at the game design for this weekend’s events. May be time to re-examine who is assigned to what, with the goal of having game designers suited for special event design working on special events. Programmers. From beta, to launch week, to DEs still broken from launch to the slow turn around time on fixes this weekend, it’s clear that you need more programmers. Maybe many more. (You need more Profession Designers as well, but that’s a separate story). Some staffing areas are just too crucial to skimp on. Bugs and flubs are to be expected, but the speed in which they can be fixed makes the difference between understanding customers and frustrated/angry customers. You should have been able to fix all the Phase One Bugs in under four hours. That your programmers could only fix some of them in a 16+ hour troubleshooting effort makes it clear you are lacking in programmers. Of course, a solid programming dept. probably wouldn’t have produced an event with so many bugs in the first place. The game is incredible and someone programmed it all, so maybe the issue is just that the programmers are overworked and the dept. (obviously) understaffed?

Love you guys. Love the Game. Want to see the game snowball into a huge success. It’s just not going to happen if you don’t have the staff and resources necessary to grow the game and ensure a solid reputation for the product. Mostly broken special events and DEs that take months to fix will not get you where you want to go.

One-time event – Halloween was mostly just a cinematic that you could hop online later and watch from someone’s upload. Those of us that had obligations Fri/Sat/Sun at noon (work, for example) could not possibly be here ANY of those days as it happened the SAME time.

I thought it would not be an issue, like Halloween, because you could log on later and do the quest chain.

Phase 1 was bugged on my server and now I am stuck with 3 items (maps and bag) that show I tried to participate, but due to bugs that were not my fault I am being penalized.

To come home and find out that I missed a HUGE event that culminated in a large chest drop that will not ever be repeated is just a slap in the face to a huge majority of the clientele.

Constructive feedback:
1. Make the event happen multiple times during a 24 hour period, but people can only loot the chest once. You did it for Halloween, how must more difficult would that be.

2. Make the one-time specific events a cinematic that does not hurt people if they don’t make it at the specific time, with the events/rewards during the 24 hour period.

3. if a quest is broken, everyone that has the precursor done should be advanced to the next step of the quest.

Halloween you knocked it out of the park – the clock tower was the most fun I have had in a MMO in a long time.
You just undid all the warm fuzzies I had in your ability to run events in one fell swoop.

Very dissatisfied customer -

Disappointing….
There was almost nothing that was not bugged. The scavenger hunt was not exciting at all. There was a big lack of explanations. I mean, when there is a scavenger hunt we are supposed to get hints right?
The finale was boring. Killing the same monster twice every time because when you take down its life it’s full again…. that’s just stupid imo What’s the point? Giving players false hopes? Just give them a big life bar already.
I did not feel connected to the event at all, it was mostly about following the herd. I think the NPC supposed to lead us talked like once… There was no emotion.
Events should not just be about giving players something to do but about FUN. The only interesting part was when we had to throw rocks with the geysers.
Not to mention how the amount of coins received for the event was completely ridiculous considering we all had to get repairs after that…

burei.7102:

• The rewards for the final event were too good. One-time events shouldn’t be profitable, but memorable. Something like an account bound unique skin, like the halloween books, would be a lot better. Just giving good tradeable items will make everyone who couldn’t take part feel cheated, and the next events to be filled with people just thinking on how much money they’ll get on the end.

Taking a chance at work to read what the event was like and it was a serious wtf moment one time event set for a time when half the world cant attend droping things like Dusk, you get used to being asked to pick up the soap being on NZ time zone but this is just kitten redicolous.

This is rediculous.
I got disconnected towards the very end, yet they want to make the most complicated way to make sure people got rewards.
Rather than that, how about making the event again, or have it happen 2 more times. To be honest it’s unfair with the sheer amount of rewards you can get from this.

baalblade.8465:

……

They KNOW this is ONE TIME event, meaning what? there will be at LEAST 50 people in one spot => heavy lag.
……

Anet – My experience:

We had big crowds of players in our overflow for all three phases. Oddly enough, there was very little lag until the karka were in the map. Not just when they were laying down the endless overlapping circles-of-instadeath, but merely when they were in the immediate map. I dodged and evaded like a madwoman but could not get out of the crazy number of overlaps most of the time.

This tells me it may have been something having to do with the monster, not necessarily the number of players (lag-wise).

Phase 1)
Crippling lag. Unmovable lag. Un-targetable enemies. One shot death (for us). Endless torment due to lag and one-shot death. No sense of achievement since the tracker said that the next day we needed to retake Lion’s Arch …….. except we had just driven the nasty karka away and things were going on as normal – well, except for the gal at the fountain hollering for donations. No real indication that donations were being used or doing any good, though.

I received no drops at all although I hear some folks did.

Found Levvi easily and the beach hunt but ended up going to wiki for instructions after that. Didn’t matter since Noll was bugged and unworkable until this morning. Miyani’s quest, oddly enough, was not bugged for me. Odd note of interest: Levvi gave me a drop of liquid karma and a copy of the first version of Mad Memories as reward before sending me Noll’s way.

Two guildmates and two PuGgers and I went into our first fractal. It was challenging, a nice change from the same old crypts and such. We didn’t finish due to DCs and a real life emergency of one person, but I count it as a positive experience I hope to repeat.

Phase 2)
Event was supposed to start at the catapult/trebuchet that was built at Ft Mariner. We adventurers all arrived to find the catapult nearing completion. We waited … and waited … and waited … and waited. The text in the event box changed to tell us good job! now go to the ship and chase the karka down! No cutscene, no karka, no fight. We board said ship and as soon as we dock, it was a zerg fest following a Lionguard.

Crippling lag. Unmovable lag. Un-targetable enemies. One shot death (for us). Endless torment due to lag and one-shot death.

I received no drops at all although I hear some folks did.

Stayed around afterward but the game crashed as I tried to waypoint out of a nasty death caused by a couple veterans and a bajillion headcrabs arriving from the sky and proceeding to eat my face.

Pre-phase 3)
I loaded to the same place I had crashed – and only the original waypoints remained of the ones I’d activated the day before. I was upset. After playing on other characters a bit to cool off, I loaded back on my main and went to where I thought the event would start.

Phase 3)
Jumping through several overflows, finally was able to meet up with two guildmates for the event. Crippling lag. Unmovable lag. Un-targetable enemies. One shot death (for us). Endless torment due to lag and one-shot death.

Halfway through, I noticed we had an Anet person running with us. I have no idea if he experienced the same incredible badness that some (most?) of us did. Game crashed during a waypoint travel but was able to reconnect and continue. More Crippling lag. Unmovable lag. Un-targetable enemies. One shot death (for us). Endless torment due to lag and one-shot death.

Finally got the Ancient Karka down, cheered its fiery death loudly. Noticed a humongous chest which was un-targetable and at first wouldn’t open. Finally opened it to receive the nice box, a sweet accessory, a rare speargun and three exotics armor pieces, only one of which I can use on my main.

Side note: husband, another 7+ year veteran of GW1, used a friend key. He wanted to try the game before we sprang for another copy (I’ve played since Beta and son has since release.) With all the various bugs and such – and he wasn’t even trying to participate in the event! – he says he will not likely purchase a copy and play. This makes me incredibly sad as Guild Wars has been a wonderful family gaming experience for us for so long.

Extremely dissapointed in the event:
-massive lag during any big fight
-quest chain was bugged and was not able to finish
-got called away to work for a little over 2h when the event started and when I came back every overflow was either finished the boss event or full up in the overflow

advice:
-don’t do ‘one time’ events – and for some awful reason if you really need to, make it accessible for more than a few hours so people have a chance to do the event, perhaps the whole day? is that so much to ask?

summary:
For a game that I feel I should enjoy quite a lot I am less and less compelled to play everyday and when things like this happen I just don’t even know why I bother sometimes. 600h+ gametime and in 2h you just killed a lot of that.

I am saddened that the many broken elements of the game were put off for this. We had Halloween little over two weeks ago. There is word you’ve already started on Wintersday. Why is piling on new content more important than fixing what isn’t working?

“My car won’t start.”
“Not to worry! We’re installing a blu-ray player!”

I’d just like to put it out there that I feel its really strange that I can play this game for 400 hours and get relatively mediocre loot from every chest, but than you give away precursors, 20 slot bags, exotics, and other great loot, on a Sunday that I have to work all day. Im not expecting to be compensated or anything but if you look at it from my perspective, I could have made as much gold today by opening this one chest as I have from playing the game since headstart. So I just feel that with those circumstances, this event should have been a 48 hour event running all through the weekend, not a one time event.

I didn’t get a disconnect during the "Final Battle’ against the “ancient karka”—-just died halfway down the slope—-waited for revival (didn’t happen)- so returned to waypoint AFTER the final cutscene (and why didn’t the ancient karka come out of the lava looking like a broiled lobster?) and walked back— on arrival, no foes, lots of friends, but no chest, either!!! Spent over 3 hours getting to this point— with “so many reinforcements” (how’d anyone keep count), and so many allies needing revival————and all for what?? NOTHING???
The next time you’re going to run a “mega-event”, PLEASE debug it FIRST!! “oops, sorry” REALLY doesn’t cut it!!

Undouble
Balsa Micoil

What DJSkittles said.
Couldn’t agree more, do you really need to give so much loot for a one-time event that’s extremely short? You may have picked a ‘peak’ time for players, but that still leaves a good chunk of people out in the cold, keep this up and it will hurt your numbers I guarantee.

Every single thing I tried to do this weekend was broken. I didn’t have a lot of time to play, which ended up being a blessing because it reduced the amount of time I spent watching event npcs stand around doing nothing. Utter shambles.

I get the idea behind limited-availability events, but if you use them they absolutely positively have to work first time. This weekend is further evidence that there is something seriously rotten in your DE code.

Starryice.5981:

One-time event – Halloween was mostly just a cinematic that you could hop online later and watch from someone’s upload. Those of us that had obligations Fri/Sat/Sun at noon (work, for example) could not possibly be here ANY of those days as it happened the SAME time.

I thought it would not be an issue, like Halloween, because you could log on later and do the quest chain.

Phase 1 was bugged on my server and now I am stuck with 3 items (maps and bag) that show I tried to participate, but due to bugs that were not my fault I am being penalized.

To come home and find out that I missed a HUGE event that culminated in a large chest drop that will not ever be repeated is just a slap in the face to a huge majority of the clientele.

Constructive feedback:
1. Make the event happen multiple times during a 24 hour period, but people can only loot the chest once. You did it for Halloween, how must more difficult would that be.

2. Make the one-time specific events a cinematic that does not hurt people if they don’t make it at the specific time, with the events/rewards during the 24 hour period.

3. if a quest is broken, everyone that has the precursor done should be advanced to the next step of the quest.

This, my goodness. What were you guys thinking? To give such huge, huge rewards (and they are huge considering the value of precursors and inventory space) for a one-time event? What of people who had been playing your game for months but just happened to be busy these days? “Tough luck, please keep buying from the gem store though!”

Come on folks, it’s time to get a grip on reality. Irritating your ‘non-concurrent peak’ customer base, no matter how “small” they may have been, will have negative exponential impacts through word of mouth/social media. And good grief, if you cannot get current tech working properly (and you can’t, sorry to say – far too many DEs, traits etc. are simply still broken since launch) then do not make new content based on this broken tech! It’s just baffling, why bother at all? It’s insulting to your content designers and it’s insulting to us.

For all of those people who were unable to attend this event, which is a lot of people, either due to disconnections, lag, work or other commitments; it is very frustrating. This kind of events are far too favorable for those that are hardcore players, who can just afk at the event location and wait, if Anet has any conscience, they would at least give thodr who didn’t make it some consolation event/prize.

The loot for those who made it was unfairly scaled. IF you FORCE players to attend these 1 time, 1 place, 1 boss events that does not repeat, you are really catering this game to hardcore/sit at home all day players.

Disappointing.

Overall the Lost Shores Events were a big failure. Some heads should roll.

Hi,

I will not go back on what I have written about the problems over this weekend or repeat what many are saying – we all know what the issues are by now!

That said and at the risk of being in a minority or called a ‘fanboy’, I actually enjoyed phase three.

I got some nice items from the final chest that where mostly not suitable for the character I was using but will come in handy.

Yes, there where many problems over the weekend and ANet needs to learn from this event and not repeat the errors but all said and done, the event is over and no amount of complaining will fix it.

So, ANet – get it right next time. I do not think Anet will be forgiven if they get another such event wrong!

General : Please start a Public Facing Test Server for these events. Even if you leave out cinematics to try and keep some surprises, the event chains really should get a heavy test. even if you limit to a invite group, having a large number of actual players (vs simulated) could help expose these issues.

Phase 1 – the information hunt was nice, only did the initial one that got stuck on Noll, didn’t do scavenger hunt.

Phase 3 – Culling was bad, although not as bad after I set myself from “Recommended” to “Best Performance” – still had culling issues however. While setting the bombs up, there were several times I died even as I was revived because there was no where to move, and got rolled over by Qwerty the Kakra, as I started to call them.

Also – If you could somehow have one-off non-contestable waypoints, that’d be nice. Or make clearing the extras part of the event. It wasn’t fun having to run across the island from the other side. “Small” area it might be, but for one lacking waypoints it’s huge.

The Ancient Kakra –
Reinforcements – overboard. With the difficulty of the Kakra, combined with how this is an all levels event (even if designed for level 80s) was overwhelming. Less numerous per reinforcement would of been nice. If you could of had them under some kind of debuff/weakened version that might of also worked.

Trapped Gas Pockets – got stuck in these several times because I accidently hit F1 while trying to break them open and I was on my thief. The fact that all /stuck does is log a quickie bug report then tell you to waypoint out… was disheartening. Especially considering the lack of any real loot to counter the costs, which where digging into my bank already after the many deaths during the bomb setup.

THE DEATH : Awesome scene.Would of liked to see it in better detail however due to lowered settings for playing reasons. Maybe post a high-res version on the site?

THE LOOT – Handled fairly well. Liked the container Also nice that the “unique” piece is available else-wise via the special vendor. Nice amount of Rare/Exotic.

Overall I enjoyed the event. Culling and getting stuck were the two BIG issues I had.

Throwing my two cents onto the pile:

I think the Southsun Cove area is amazing. Gorgeous area, with tons of nooks and crannies that I’d like to explore.

Not entirely thrilled with the inhabitants, however. Even my level 80 characters with rare armor (can’t afford exotics yet) were losing a significant portion of their health with one fight against the young Karka. In many other parts of the game I can easily solo multiple normal enemies, and a veteran is not certain doom. Southsun Cove? More than one normal enemy and it’s likely that I’m going to be downed. I could run with a zerg, but it’s odd that in so many other parts of the game I can do fine solo, then I’m expected to be in a group for this. (disclaimer: haven’t been to Orr yet, though I have played a bit in the Straits of Devastation)

The scavenger hunt could have been interesting. There seemed to be the beginnings of a back story to the karka and their origins and even why they wanted to attack Lion’s Arch. I feel that the story wasn’t well developed, however. Canach visited the land of karka, and took some plant life that made the karka really angry? Angry enough to follow him all the way back to Lion’s Arch? Did I… did I miss something? We’re not even told what the plant was, much less why the karka were so protective of it. Then again, I missed a lot of the dialogue at the beginning of phase 2, simply because I wasn’t at the Lion’s Court for the beginning (because nothing gave me an indication of where in LA to be). So it’s possible I missed more of the back story.

The finale was really long. And difficult. We had multiple instances where 90% of the players were dead. In part from too many ground effects to be able to see the poison on the ground, but mostly due to culling. It’s hard to fight an enemy that you can’t even target (but during the reinforcement stages, the invisible enemies had no problem chaining knockdowns to my character).

I am pleased that there was a chest at the end of the very long fight, and I did pick up my two exotics and two rares and karka items. However I also fully understand the concerns of the people who were not able to attend the event. I expected to see a few karka-themed armor skins. Probably account bound. This might have helped with people getting upset for missing it — though it might also have made people cranky due to insufficient rewards. I don’t suppose there’s any way to alleviate this. Unless, of course, the event was more like a dungeon with multiple possible runs (and allowing people to loot the chest only once per account).

All of this, however, was overshadowed by the bugs.

I’m not going to reiterate all of the bugs that I saw, they’ve been discussed at length on the forums already. But what this could have been was an enjoyable if somewhat disjointed event. What it turned out to be was… rather disappointing.

Phase 1: Numerous Bugged NPCs.
Phase 3: EXCESSIVELY lag ridden over-flow servers. It took me 2 hours to find one that had no lag. When I did it was like halle F lujah, instantly the event went from hate to enjoyment.

Ok, I’ll try to make this short and clear.

BAD:
- Anet made the same mistake twice: overstimatng the impact of hundreds of players at the same time, at the same place. During the peak of the final event fights, there was a 7-9s delay between a button press and the actual skill being triggered. Enemies would be drawn only when they were 2 meters away (despite being 10m creatures with damaging long-range attacks). Skill effects were all over the place, blinding us to the few things we coulh have seen. What should have been a fun event was turned into random skill mashing, hoping not to die too much to invisible attacks and mobs. Is that Anet’s idea of fun?
- The final event was way too long. 1h would have been fine. 2h30 is too much.
- Bugged NPC’s (I was lucky, but most of my guildies were not).
- At one point, the end of a phase was not clear: in phase 2, we could get to do events on Southsun Cove. However, it was no clear whether or not we were supposed to find a way inside the cave (I had to look on the wiki).

GOOD:
- The final event rewards; despite dying so many times and being there for so long, I felt properly rewarded.
- Other than the exemple I mentionned, information was well transmitted: NPC’s would inform me on where to investigate next. Time and location of the different phases were on the website. No need to look at guides.
- My fractal experience was fun (yes, even the swamp one). Glad to see this new dungeon. It’s easy to see how they can add new parts to it, and build upon it.
- Overall, I like the new ideas brought by this event.

SUGGESTION:
- Less people on servers during events. Your servers currently allow more people than they can properly handle. More servers, less people on each.
- More testing. There were lot of bugs during the Mad King event. There were many bugs during this one. You can do better.

Please Arenanet, continue having good ideas for event, but be realistic: as it is, your servers simply can’t handle those massive one-time events. The mad King event proved it. You didn’t believe it? This event proved it once again. The 2h30 of the final event was a very painful experience. Not fun. At all. Which is a shame after such a fine buildup.

I know you can do better for Wintersday. However, after the Mad King event, I also though that for this event…

Really not impressed with Arena-net for the second time in a week. First they add a new tier of gear and then they give out 20g-300g worth of stuff away on a one time event that not everyone had a chance to attend. The reward should have been a soulbound armour or weapon skin to show you were there, rather than a reward worth up to hundreds of hours of farming.

The rest of the content was fun, I love the fractals and the new zone is neat… but I feel pretty alienated by receiving a jug of karma for the content I was around for vs the 3 exotics and 20 slot bag I was not around for.

Blade Syphon.4325:

I’m not going to re-type out the massive wall ‘o text I had in the last thread, so I’ll just summaraize:

Day 1 – Marred with bugs that have been present in other Dynamic Events since day 1, lag that Anet should have prepared for, poor communication between GMs and Players when they tried to come in and “Fix” the broken bits.

Day 2 – A total fiasco that ended with many not seeing the starting events that lead to Southsun Cove. There is also a painfully large lack of content to do on Southsun Shore now that the event is over, and the mob balancing there is ridiculously bad. I doubt many are going to spend much time here when they can have a much easier time farming mats for their Ascended and Legendary gear in Orr or the FoM.

Day 3 – Terrible pacing and overly-long segments of the Dynamic Event to simply “pad” for time made for one of the most un-enjoyable experiences I, and many, have had in this game. Couple that with the DC issues, the horrible lag, and the lack of fun from the event and you have one of the most unforgettably awful events to “Grace” an MMO in a very long time.

The short of it is: Guild Wars 2 needs a Public Test Server so players can test this content and give feed back and report bugs before it goes live. There is no reason this mess should have reached the live servers in the state it was at launch.

One Time Events like this also need to stop if this is what the future of them is going to be. The events would be fine occasionally to mark the launch of a new expansion or what not, as long as these events lasted for a week or two with repeating Dynamic Events so those that are unable to attend (for whatever reason) on one day can still participate on another without missing out on anything.

Blade Syphon hit the nail on the head. In every regard. The event was poorly executed and the information was bleak at best. I don’t want to use a walkthrough to experience an event in GW2. I shouldn’t need a point by point breakdown of the location of every exact npc or I won’t get the story, item, whatever, nevermind the fact that half those NPCs were bugged. It was just bad. Really, really bad. And I don’t feel like anyone on your team gives a kitten about people that work on the weekends, suffice to say that nobody that works for ANET acknowledged that we play GW2 and get juiced on the content because of that, that the scheduling was a poor choice, that the time-line was badly iterated. My feelings for this are the polar opposite of the Mad King event. Mad King was awesome. This is tripe.

Bugged Noll and Quaggon, couldnt finish event and when the patch came, couldnt finish Quaggon, she was discontinued.
Final event, got the karka down to 1/2 hp. Got disconnected.
Couldnt even get back into the event until it was over, so i got no loot or no idea what happens at the end.
BIGGEST waste of time and effort for nothing.
They need to treat this as a trial run, and prepare better for rerunning the event.
You got loot? Good on you for being one of the rare few who didnt have all these problems happen to you.
As for me and the thousands of other who got screwed over by this event, it would only be fair to get some sort of compensation.

Terrible lags with total standstill, several disconnects, one BTD, several Event chains broken or at least delayed, no loot (in first one-time-event – 10 karka-kills), small loot (in second one-time-event = 1 gold, 2 greens, about one bag full of white and garbage – 34 more karka-kills including the lost shores experience), got killed (because of lag, disconnect and reconnect with long loading).

This is really nothing to be proud of. And it was not much to enjoy too.

I was having more fun on this last day. While repeating the lost shores experience from the day before. But I died too much. Even with being careful and in a big group, I could not avoid being killed too much. When this is increased by getting a disconnect and thrown into another different environment upon return (instead of cleaned area, one that is still under karka-control), I lost the fun. I lost more money than I made and thus I called it quits.

This whole event was a massive failure due to the lack of quality assurance (QA) starting from day/phase 1 of the event. The event felt rushed, and untested. I mean, phase 1 was barely playable with crippling lag and connection issues, phase 2 provided bugged NPCS resulting in players unable to do the scavenger hunt, and phase 3 saw absurd lag and connectivity issues once again, invisible mobs that one shot, and to top it off, rewarded those that were lucky enough to play for 3-4 hours and stay connected, absurd loot for a one time event (20 slot bag, exotic earring, and exotics with an incredibly high % for precursors).

At least the Halloween event gave players an equal shot and time to obtain the worthwhile items (exotic boots / backpack) where for this event players were unaware of the rewards, and had to dedicate 3-4 hours while having to dealing with the frustration of lagging every step of the way.

Also, players who weren’t/aren’t able to dedicate 3-4 hours basically end up with nothing thus prompting something like “checkpoints” for events like this that are going to last such a long time. These checkpoints could reward players with a token to redeem at a event vendor or something so that they wouldn’t feel like they wasted hours for absolutely nothing. This would also help alleviate players who disconnect at crucial times (like when the chest spawned) and allow them to at least get SOMETHING.

Having played through each phase and completing every event, to get disconnected after the landslide while the 2nd reinforcement DE was about to finish, to receive NOTHING for my time and efforts felt like a huge waste of time. Also, to find out that the chest at the end of the event contained such incredible loot (which it should never have for a ONE TIME EVENT), felt like a huge FU to someone like me who has been playing since headstart, farming for their legendary since reaching 80, to hear that an epic earring (25 to all stats, +3MF) and that precursors were handed out like it was candy on Halloween to even those on trial accounts.

/endrant of a disgruntled and sorely disappointed customer, and fan of GW.

> The scavanger/talk-to-npc chain event/quest is largely unorganized. I have no single idea/clue where to go and where to start even after reading the mails and talking all highlighted NPC in Lion’s Arch. This is resolved upon reading Dulfy’s guide regarding this. Then again I could not open the sealed box and retrieve soggy bag even using the crowbar, for some unknown reason though I have send support ticket regarding this issue. Now that I am not able to complete that, I couldn’t complete the rest of it. Bugged, again.

> Fractal of the Mist Dungeon is nice & creatively done. The traps, ideas is simply amazing. But again, another grind-fest in the future but that’s not the main problem. Main problem lies in the fact that elitist attitude will be even more serious for FoTM compared to the previous dungeons. As we level up, lower level players will be rejected from the party as no one will care about other players’ character progression. Design flaw, how can Arenanet overlook this? What if I am level 5 FoTm and wish to play with my friends of lvl1 and still able to level up my FOTM? Simply unlikely.

On top of that, we would waste an hour in LA shouting LFG FoTM Lvl4 for an hour before we actually get a proper party. Somewhat absurd.

> Lost Shore – tons and tons of deserted overflow servers.
Major events all attuned to US prime time and the rest of the world is forgotten. I am playing in Sea of Sorrows from South East Asia. Missed the Mad King, missed the karka again, as expected. But even if I were to join, probably ends up in dc/lag-fest then followed by rage-fest as we are further away from the servers.

>Ascended Gears – Though it does not differs when you are not in FoTM, people will still strive for what’s best for them. So Exotic will be the new rare, and ascended will be the new exotic. Simply put, exotic will soon regarded as somewhat less valuable when full ascended gear is implemented in the future. Hopefully this is implemented well enough to prevent that from happening.

I don’t care that people think others are crying about it. The bottom line is maybe a 1 day event I could handle but, to have it for a few hrs. In one day is Bull. Some of us have work, families, and even live in other time zones. I do not care about the loot. What I do care about is being able to participate in the Event.

Before people start with the “QQ, You didn’t have to participate, Blah blah blah”. Considering most that say stuff like that had probably already participated in it. Bottom line is being fair to your consumer base.

This is my feedback on Arena Net on how this was done/ handled.

Reposted since it was moved.

Everything that I would say has been said 10 times over. I just want it on record, as a huge GW and GW2 event, this was very disappointing and not your finest moment Anet. I just hope you learn from this and don’t make the same mistakes on the next event. BTW, my friends that I invited to play the trial heard nothing but complaining in chat the whole time and it turned them off. The free trial + this event was even a worse idea. I love what you guys have done with the game thus far, so I’m hoping this is just a minor set back and you get back to delivering quality content again.

I have to say, with phase 1 being botched so badly I really considered giving up on the entire event, then I had problems with the start of phase 2, but the boat was there so I decided to persevere and head over to the island just to check it out. It was fun there and the Skipping Stones jumping puzzle was excellent. Then came phase 3, which, with the problems of the previous two days, I was anticipating with some gentile apprehension. I have to say phase 3 was epic and, for me at least, makes up for the problems and frustration caused by phase 1 and to a lesser extent 2. Well done…it was a blast, I loved every minute of the 3 hours phase 3 took and I truly appreciate all the work that went in to making this possible.

I’m so glad to know that because i had to go see my grandpa, that i got to lose out on all the rewards that came from a series of unbalanced mobs. While i have suggested this game up to now, i have to say that I probably will not make any such suggestions until you learn to balance out mobs, fix bugs in a timely manner and swear to never cheat those of us can only put a normal persons amount of time into a video game out of rewards that you give to three day trial members.

This has been my experience with the Lost Shores events. (This is looooooong)

Phase One -
>The build up was exciting, and the idea behind the first event was great, but the amount of lag (my auto-attack was in slow motion for me, a shortbow shooting at the rate of a longbow or less) was hard to play with. Also, the fact that you could do thousands of damage to a Karka, and still not receive any credit for the kill was another let down, especially when a certain drop was needed to hand into the event npc. It makes it feel as though you’re just helping everyone else kill the monster faster, yet you yourself don’t really matter in terms of the game recognising your efforts.

>The mini-missions afterwards I thought were fine, they were the right length – not too short but not too long. The main problem with them however was they were almost all completely bugged (Sylvari and Largos NPC’s) or ill-explained. I think the event information box should be more detailed, not just tell you the name of an npc and make you guess the rest.

>Fractals is a fun dungeon which can be further expanded later on, which is awesome. My only problems with this is the elitism it creates (people making gear, level, and difficulty barriers – I run the dungeon with my boyfriend who is level 65, and he has been kicked multiple times because of his level) and the new tier of armour which I thought was a bit of a slap in the face

Phase Two -
> Again I felt like there was a lack of communication with this one, I was in an overflow for about 15mins and the event hadn’t triggered, but I got the option to travel to non-overflow, which I took my chances with. Upon entering the new server, the event had obviously triggered and was about halfway through. I had no idea what was going on, I saw a giant Karka on half health, then regen to full health, about 30 people dead around it, and everyone else standing on a near-by bridge trying to lure it over. Rather suddenly we watched a very short cutscene and had the option to travel to the Lost Shores. Everyone ditched the Karka and set sail.

>The event chain on LS was very enjoyable. It still had the problem of doing lots of damage but not getting event credit, but made up for it because it felt awesome running around helping to scout/take back/rebuild the island. My main problem with this was the abrupt ending. I wasn’t sure if it was over or still going, for quite a while after.

(to be continued!)

This event was basically a disaster: from the glitched npcs in the first 2 phases which meant I couldn’t finish and move on to doing Miyani’s quest; to the final one time event where it appears loot tables were altered to provide high level loot yet this was not highlighted beforehand and was extremely difficult for someone in my timezone to do given that it occurred on a working day.

To have skins as a reward is one thing but to basically give away exotics and have a greatly increased chance of getting a precursor on a one time event which was at a time inconvenient to a large number of your players is a slap in the face to those players.

(continued from above)

Phase Three - Oh gosh, phase three….
I guess i’m going to be a bit biased in this section but this is my personal experience.
>Firstly, no one in my overflow really knew where the event would trigger. GW2 website said lions arch, rumours were twitter had said LS. Once we got past that hurdle, things got worse.

> The mail with the location to start at came too late. You pretty much had to get to LS yourself, wait for the mail then run to the poi, only to figure out that wasn’t actually where the event was happening, it was further north.
> – The Demolition – A great idea, but badly executed. I couldn’t see any mobs unless they had died, or I had died. All I did was stand back and tab through invisible creatures, again not receiving credit for kills. (44 mins into it, my sound went all "weowowowowwweeeowww"" on me, and then my game froze so I had to restart the client. When I logged back in I was in a new overflow, where the event had not progressed to the point I dc’d at, so I waited a good 15mins to be revived and re-join a group. Once rezz’d we made our way to the Ancient Karka.)

> The Ancient Karka was hit by a tree, and then started spawning a lot of adds. We got the reinforcements to about 90% killed when due to massive lag (none of my skills, heals, or player-reviving-options activating for about 5 mins), my connection to the server was lost and I had to re-log. This put me into my 3rd overflow, where the reinforcement bar wasn’t even a half full. Again, the lag was so bad i’m pretty sure I never got to activate a skill or heal, and was kicked a whole 10+ minutes later. I then re-logged into my FOURTH DIFFERENT OVERFLOW, where the reinforcements bar was completely empty, and I had to start again. I didn’t lag in this overflow,
and we managed to get 75% of the reinforcements killed before, AGAIN, I got the weird “weooweweoww” sound bug and my game froze, making me close the client and re-load. Upon reloading to my now FIFTH OVERFLOW (and every overflow I hopelessly tried to join after this one) the event box told me the event was now over.

So, after all that my main points of feedback are:
> Send mails early, be more descriptive in the Event Progression box
> Find a fix to the whole not-getting-credit for kills issue, so that everyone is recognised for their participation
>Find a way to do events where the lag will be minimal, or at least bearable, without massive dc’s for players or people who waypoint to res
>Fix Overflows so that you don’t lose your place or have to restart/miss events

and some others i’d like to add:
>I think the chest giving precursors/lots of exotics was a bad idea, especially as this was a one time event
and
>Consider scrapping the one time events in favor of instanced or re-playable events so that people from all time zones can attend (I woke up at 5am on Sat, Sun, and Monday to do these events because i’m Australian)
It might be a lot to ask, but that’s my PERSONAL experience and feedback (and a little venting!).

A-Net you guys could of tested the 1st stage a little better. The NPCs was just like the ghosts in Lion Arch during Halloween bugged. So please in the future test the NPCs.

Moving on the last stage was well worth the lag and deaths. You guys finally stopped being so stingy. IDK why you guys are always soooo stingy with things but this time you guys actually rewarded players and made them happy good job. Thankyou.

To the players who still want the earing and didnt get it there is a way. If you can farm or buy 1000 shells theres an NPC on the island that will sell you one.

I’d personally like to see the maximum allowed population limit for over flow servers slashed by at least 30%, it would make the over-flow server(s) less prone to lag and crashing during these one time only events.

But leave the main servers maximum allowed population as is.

The Lost Shores event wasted every minute of my time spent playing. It was not enjoyable in the least. It’s almost a clever concept – alien invasion except from the sea – but that’s been done a million times, so it’s not new. I don’t feel like I’m being rewarded for my time and money spent playing. When I invest – I get lag, or completely disconnected, or have resources removed because of exploiters, or the event I’m in decides to get stuck, or a monster goes berserk and kills me because of a bug, or it goes invulnerable because I stepped up on a pebble. If I’m lucky enough to survive and win the day my reward is a hoof or an unsalvageable scale or maybe even butter!

Seriously, spend more time fixing the existing bugs, especially with dynamic events and daggers sticking through people’s legs, and drop the crap like Lost Shores. I want a game that works, and I want to feel rewarded for my efforts.

P.S. – Stealing my money every time I want to go somewhere is not cool.

I loved the finale event, thought it was fantastic – it was however, like always a bit too many people and mobs on screen at once.

Later on I helped in a far quieter overflow and it was way more fun due to the fact we had room and fps spare to actually perform proper combat strategy instead of just mashing 1 and hoping you hit something in the chaos.

But that is just nitpicking, I’m very happy with the content.

This event was a bust. And I’m not the least bit surprised. I tried to enjoy this game, but as it stands I’m done.

The Good:
- The fractal dungeon is awesome fun!
- New jump puzzles!
- Almost epic 3rd phase event (but see below)

The Bad:
- Zone wipes
- 2-3 hr long one time event is just plain brutal. It felt longer. If it wasn’t for how long it took to DPS those crabs down and took maybe an hour it would have been much more enjoyable.

The Ugly:
- The large gap in reward distribution is upsetting.

I’m disappointed in the event. Not at all with the new content, I’m thrilled with Fractals of the Mists and I look forward to replaying it in my search for the beautiful new Fractal weapons. I don’t even have issues with the Ascended items, in fact I’m kind of excited for them. The Southsun Shore zone is okay, I’ll get used to it, though the karkas have issues I’m sure we’ll work around them. However, what I have troubles with was the event itself and I’ll explain why.

Starting with the beginning in Lion’s Arch, it herded everyone in a maximum populated map into a very small area with incredibly tough mobs and resulted in the biggest lagfest I’ve seen in the game. Even for BWE1 when we killed the legendary rabbit it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as this and that one made me crash. I was unable to dodge, heal, activate skills or move without a good 30s buffer between my actions and the result. I’m sure spreading out the Karka attack across the whole map would have been a massive improvement.

Next, the investigation. I was excited to start it, and the helpful golden star icons over the event NPC’s was a nice touch to help find relevant people. However, apparently for the beach combing section there’s a specific order that you need to examine the debris in before you’re able to recover the soggy bag from the wrecked ship. I did it by luck on my first character but had trouble on my second. My other friends too, had trouble interacting with the sealed barrel despite having a crowbar equipped. Why was there an order to it? Being able to grab the crowbar and open the relevant barrel if you know where it is would make sense, no point in extra obfuscations if you’re doing it on an alt.

Next, the Phase 1 NPC’s. Oh man. The quaggan was fine, but the Hylek section was very confusing. The clue seemed deliberately out of order so if you tried to follow the directions you failed. The chemistry components were also spread out in a very unintuitive manner and were hard to find, making the constant running back from the NPC’s misdirection frustrating.

As for the largos, he never worked for me the entire weekend. I visited him on the first day and though he was there, he wasn’t talking to anyone. Later, when I got on on Saturday, he was gone but the chest was there with a quest icon over it and no way to interact with it. And today, the chest was there with no icon, no Largos and nobody there at all.

Okay, so I give up with the scavenger hunt. I’ll go find Noll. He forgot to show up for work. I tried visiting him several times on Friday and Saturday and he was never there at the Hanto Trading Post. Lots of people were looking for him too, he never showed. Today (Sunday) Noll was there but wouldn’t speak to me other than a generic “go away I’m busy” message.

So, even though I had the quest items in my inventory, I was unable to complete the Phase 1 quest. The idea seemed to be that once Phase 2 started, that was the end of Phase 1 and it could no longer be completed. Why?? During the Mad King event, no matter what phase the event was on you were allowed to complete all the content previous to that. It’s very obvious to me that that’s the way it should always be. That’s the way that’s fair to people who are unable to log in on the first day but don’t want to miss anything. Even though I was there and logged in and participating, Phase 1 completely failed to work and thus I trashed the knickknacks out of frustration and space issues.

Unfortunately, this means I feel completely without context. I don’t know what the Karka are, where they came from or why they randomly attacked. I only know that the Consortium were trying to turn Southsun Cove into a tourist destination, and that the gate they were building to send people there sends people to a dungeon instead. What’s the connection between the Consortium and Fractals of the Mists? Who is Canach? What did he do? I feel like I’ve missed so much and there’s no NPC’s offering any sort of information about it at all. I’ve played every day of this weekend event for hours and spoken to every named and even generic NPC I can find and I still have no idea what’s going on. I don’t skip text, I read it. I want to know the story, and the lore, so where is it? The event didn’t explain why Karka were able to attack in the Maguuma Jungle and Kryta, and if you’re unable to complete the investigation you’re just kitten out of luck.

Overall: Very disappointed.

The Good: Fractcals. They are amazing. Well done!

The Bad: I was unable to complete the event. By the time we got to the Reinforcements chain, the lag was SO UNBEARABLE that actions wouldn’t register til after 5 seconds.

It’s not a FPS issue: it was perfect. I could not play and finish it. I got into other overflows, and others had the same issue.

Many players had the same issue. They, too, couldn’t even find it playable.

It was something that I could not control. I have no control over the lag- I’ve NEVER had a performance issue in GW2 until this event chain. I don’t care about the rewards, I just wanted to EXPERIENCE the event but I was robbed of it.

So the feedback thread in which everyone expressed their dissatisfaction with the numerous bugs in this event was lost to a bug?

Right, then.

Things I liked:

The new zone is great. It’s nice looking, the jumping puzzle is a ton of fun and fits in well with the zone theme, the mobs are challenging enough to be interesting. The drop table for the new mobs could stand to be looked at, but aside from that I really like Southsun Cove.

Fractals is a great dungeon – gorgeous, varied and well scripted. The DC bug is a tad obnoxious, but I’m sure that will be fixed soon.

Things I’m not too sure about:

Ascended loot and infusion slots. Are we abandoning the cosmetic basis of endgame gear for the same never-ending grind for minor equipment upgrades I dislike in other games? Wasn’t this game supposed to be free of that?

Things I didn’t like:

This event was so buggy that it’s hard to believe there was much testing done beforehand. A bug or two I can understand. Every phase and quest having major bugs, not so much.

The communication from Anet over which bugs were being fixed, which events would continue working and which would be shut off, and just what was going on was enormously confusing. I waited long periods for events that were bugged with no updates given about when they’d be fixed, and just as long for other events that turned out to have been shut down despite forum posts saying the bugged portions would still be doable after the end of phase 1.

Edit: And apparently I missed phase 3 altogether, because it took place at a time I couldn’t log in and it won’t be repeated. Frustrating. Please don’t do this again.

Here are some screenshots of the atrocities I cannot stand to continue to experience in this game.

Fighting while going to drop the bombs off in the first segment:
http://i1352.photobucket.com/albums/q657/compulord155/gw014.jpg
http://i1352.photobucket.com/albums/q657/compulord155/gw015.jpg

Notice how the champion is visible in the first shot, but not in the second, not to mention players that are missing or are fading in or out.

Again, during the first ‘Defeat the Reinforcements’ sub event:
http://i1352.photobucket.com/albums/q657/compulord155/gw019.jpg
http://i1352.photobucket.com/albums/q657/compulord155/gw020.jpg

Notice all the dead and downed players that appear in shot 20 that weren’t there in shot 19. I wasn’t very far from them, and I didn’t walk very far to see them.

Here are a list of shots that show attacks coming from invisible enemies in a variety of places:

http://i1352.photobucket.com/albums/q657/compulord155/gw003jpg
http://i1352.photobucket.com/albums/q657/compulord155/gw004.jpg
http://i1352.photobucket.com/albums/q657/compulord155/gw005.jpg
http://i1352.photobucket.com/albums/q657/compulord155/gw006.jpg
http://i1352.photobucket.com/albums/q657/compulord155/gw008.jpg
http://i1352.photobucket.com/albums/q657/compulord155/gw011.jpg

In combat, at the first ‘Defeat the Reinforcements’ sub event:
http://i1352.photobucket.com/albums/q657/compulord155/gw026.jpg
http://i1352.photobucket.com/albums/q657/compulord155/gw027.jpg

Notice how all the players disappear from shot 26 to shot 27 and the mobs that suddenly appeared. I walked forward just a few short steps.

Here’s a shot of me looting an invisible corpse (notice the lack of sparkle particles):

http://i1352.photobucket.com/albums/q657/compulord155/gw012.jpg

More invisible enemies popping in:

http://i1352.photobucket.com/albums/q657/compulord155/gw023.jpg
http://i1352.photobucket.com/albums/q657/compulord155/gw024.jpg

I’m not downed, but I’m still channeling the healing skill:
http://i1352.photobucket.com/albums/q657/compulord155/gw028.jpg
http://i1352.photobucket.com/albums/q657/compulord155/gw029.jpg

And, finally, more suddenly appearing enemies, in large quantities:

http://i1352.photobucket.com/albums/q657/compulord155/gw030-2.jpg
http://i1352.photobucket.com/albums/q657/compulord155/gw031-2.jpg

I’d like a sincere explanation for this problem, as well as a proposed solution. I’m getting tired of running through highly-populated areas and not seeing player or guildmates or, worse, being killed by enemies (mobs or players in WvW) that I cannot see.

reposting here…
—————————————————————————————————————————————-

Overall, although I missed the last event for something like 15 mins (arrived at 9H15 and it was over :-/ )

The weekend was fun BUT…
…a call to Game Designer : STOP THINKING THAT 100 PLAYERS ALL FIGHTING TOGETHER IN BIG SOUP OF SPELL FX IS FUN
It’s not : lag, bad framerate, server crash, confusion, brainless people behavior, and a weak sense of personal achievement are the common problem of all those zerg fest, and it’s not really my definition of what fun is
Suggestions
Make it so people must spread a bit and control key points
Player would win because they manage to capture and hold several key points (runes, siege weapon, etc)
Even against a single giant NPC, It can all be close from the big boss, so you are part of the fight and can see what’s happening (final cutscene for everyone !), but at least you feel like you did some part, that you won because you played well, not because the Boss was bound to lose over time whatever happens
On top of that, you can reduce all the annoyances I mentioned above in the zerg fest
It would probably only require a simple but clear UI so you can see where people are needed to help.

It’s ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS that they put precursors in the drop table for this event. A few lucky people hit the friggin lottery and either have a HUGE head start for a legendary or never have to worry about gold again. Others got loot worth about 1/100th as much. It’s also really stupid to give out non-scaled loot for a scaled event. As a level 78 who was very active during the event I contributed as much or more than a lot of the level 80s (and there were lots of people that went AFK and came back just to collect the reward). I really feel slighted.

With that said, I feel even worse for the people that couldn’t make the event.

Adding my voice to the feedback.

Days 1 and 2 of the event were lackluster, the bugs were frustrating, and as for Day 3, I think ANet overshot “epic” and landed on “tedious”. I have really no opinion one way or the other on the Fractals dungeon, since I’m not really a dungeon-runner, but the little bit I did do seemed quite a bit of fun.

The entire event surrounding the Ancient Karka certainly had potential and had definite hints of greatness — the final push to chase her down the hive and ultimately kill her was certainly fun — but the lead-up to it, particularly the nightmare of the “reinforcements” phases, was too drawn out and repetitive and just plain too long.

For me the lag and freezes and DC’s were teeth-grindingly frustrating, but thankfully not event-breaking, and were a combination both of my (and other people’s) systems not being able to handle the sheer number of people participating, and of ANet’s decision to have this be a one-time-only thing all compressed into a single few hours, resulting in that sheer number of people who all wanted to see the event.

I think overall the event and the community would have been better served by having a longer event that perhaps didn’t culminate in one single lagtastic grind of a battle. I find myself thinking about WoW’s pre-expansion events, of which Wrath’s was by far the best in my mind: small invasions all over the world, in many different spots, which helped spread out the population. Rewards were determined by how much or how little you felt like doing, in the form of special event-only currency to trade for event-only toys, tidbits, and armor. And it went on long enough that everybody got a chance to participate.

Overall, I think the event as a whole earns a solid “meh” from me: it wasn’t great, it wasn’t horrible. Some parts of it were fun, other parts made me glad this was the only time we’ll see it.