Guild Wars 2

Endest.5729:

In short, lost shores is some of the worst “content” I have ever seen in over ten years of MMO experiences.

Bug ridden, lag filled, exclusionary, and worst of all many folks spent hours on it and got no rewards at all. Others, who had the ability to play at Areanet’s convenience and were lucky enough not to get bugged or disconnected, got rewards worth more gold than than many folks will ever see in the game.

I can not think of a worst way to treat customers.

they could ban us permanently for downing their ability to do their job just saying

miniL.7361:

PS: Forgot, same as not making the event 2 long, announce it far before teh weekend with all times so people can plan and schedule for it. I understand some people might have been planning other stuff, missing parts of the event, or the whole event if they where gone for the weekend.

Actually, as far as I know, they gave a 3 week advance notice, at least that’s what I’ve read in a few of the many rant threads

Mark Katzbach.9084:

Hey all, due to a glitch in our forum software, when merging two threads, the original Feedback Thread was lost to the ether. It is not our intention to remove threads with legitimate player feedback. We value what you have to say, both positive and negative (as long as it is said in a polite and respectful manner).

That said, please use this thread for your general feedback. This thread will remain stickied for ease of posting and viewing.

Again, please accept our apologies on the loss of the previous thread.

edit: as a note for those of you who are unhappy because you were disconnected and did not receive rewards from the event, Regina has made the following post in the existing thread on that topic

ReginaBuenaobra.6953:

We have a team looking into disconnection problems that prevented some people from receiving their event rewards.

We will update you as soon as we have more information available.

Thank you, and we apologize that you were unable to claim your rewards.

Mark,
Please visit this thread for constructive criticism as well as very realistic suggestions for future One Time events : https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/lostshores/Suggestions-for-Future-One-Time-Events/first#post812720

Yeah it was quite a letdown.

A broken NPC for a quest I never bothered finishing, the same mobs over and over, and then after hanging around all weekend I have to go do something IRL and I miss a bunch of exotics and a 20 slot bag from what I hear. Oh and jumping puzzles, but whats the point of frustrating yourself with a jumping puzzle?

As for dungeons… well I haven’t been able to do ANY dungeons, since no one I knew was on and I hate pugging. Maybe we could have the option of NPCs at a dungeon’s entrance like the old style henchmen? Just in case someone doesn’t feel like gathering up people.

The new map itself is really nice to look at and don’t get me wrong, I still love GW2 a lot… but I wish I didn’t spend so much hoping something big would happen, and I wished I had the time at the end of the weekend to get the worthwhile rewards.

I participated in :

Friday Karka invasion
Sunday afternoon event
Could not do Saturday due to family commitments (married with kids and saturday 3PM est is prime weekend time for activities)

Pros / Cons

Pros :
- Imaginative idea and nice to see that A-Net is working to spice things up regularly
- Great way to open up a new area
- Communications on event were a lot better than Halloween event
- Stars for event quest givers was great idea
- I love that low level characters are scaled up for events to allow participation
- Very good way to bring community together
- Players were excellent – co-operating / rezzing etc
- Huge chest reward / 20 slot bag / ring and assorted gold items at end of karka fight was a pleasant surprise

Main Negatives :
- Frame rate issues even at lowest graphic settings with swarms of mobs and players on my older pc / Nvidia 460 card.
- Significant key input / action lag at server side which made activating skills and staying alive more a matter of luck at times
- Could not see drops from karka amongst all the on screen mess and trying to pick up drops was affected badly by input lag
- It was not clear when some of the events were no longer active since quest givers in lions arch were still giving quest starter dialog for beach scavenging for example
- Having events at single point in time – although cool – does create challenges for people with jobs / families etc
- Karka event on sunday started off really well – and was overall well designed but the waves of reinforcements got very old very fast and when I did not have a rez point near the battlefield initially and had to run back across zones with respawned mobs especially at end sequence – it was quite hazardous
- Crashes during the event . I crashed 3 times – last of which was 5 seconds after looting chest from the karka so I was very lucky

-

I know it takes away from the mystery of the event an all that, but next time, for grown ups with jobs and kids and wives… maybe just hide under a spoiler alert: “This is when the main thing is happening, you WILL be getting decent loot so be sure to attend.”

These things are fun when you have the time to spend all day in them, but some people just can’t.

ophidic.1279:

I know it takes away from the mystery of the event an all that, but next time, for grown ups with jobs and kids and wives… maybe just hide under a spoiler alert: “This is when the main thing is happening, you WILL be getting decent loot so be sure to attend.”

These things are fun when you have the time to spend all day in them, but some people just can’t.

This… pls

Pros:

• Fractals solve many design issues other dungeons have.
• New island is harder than other high-end locations → good direction, I expect even harder content in the open world in the future.
• One time events that change the world are cool idea.

Cons:

• Because of the event you made no progress on 8 dungeons which are completely broken.
• New crafting resources and no collection’s bank tab?
• New crafting resources not in-line with old ones?
• How it is possible, that there are sigils and traits in the game that don’t work, and yet you add new island? How it is possible that most of the areas in the game lacks content or has content that is broken, and you add dynamic events to newly developed zone?
• Your execution of one time event was pathetic. Both technically and design-wise. I agree with most of the complaits you see on forum on this subject. Currently WoW which is static old fashioned quest based game, does the stuff better with phasing. You need to re-think your approach on this subject. One example: Explain me this: Why after 400h of play, doing dozens of really hard jumping puzzles, finishing most paths in your dungeons and finishing personal story, having 3 crafting disciplines on 400 and generally exploring a lot of the locations in the world and doing generally speaking the hardest content you have available in the game I got less rewards overall, than standing and doing nothing for 2h during the event (I got such huge lags that I couldn’t even execute my skills). (Earring and Bag are most valuable items I currently have on my character).

I expect that you finish the game. No more adding major content before the game shines. Bugfixes section of the patch notes was pathetic! Guild Wars 2 was not ready for the release and you made some promises that you did not fulfill. I’d recommend you start working on that because I’m quitting the game if next patch notes look similar to the last ones.

My overall opinion is that, in the game’s current state, pushing out new content like Lost Shores monthly is simply too ambitious.

The game was only released a couple of months ago – player housing, guesting, culling issues, and a multitude of bug problems still exist. Releasing broken new content without fixing what’s already broken in the existing content isn’t going to go anywhere.

I suggest focusing on fixing the already existing issues before pushing out content like this. Because of this, the content released has been buggy and hasn’t helped the game’s reputation at all. By fixing already broken content, you’d be able to focus fully on the new content instead of spreading yourself thin over so many issues that need to be fixed.

Again, just my opinion…wondering if anyone else feels the same.

I hope we will get an announcement on these 1 time events soon. It would help me to know whether my break from GW2 will be permanent.

This post is in regards to the issues myself and many players had when it came to fighting the final boss, and the rather underwhelming response from Anet thus far:

Due to a lack of response on the part of Anet about the Disconnect/Overflow server issues, I’ve gotten to the point where I just don’t care to play anymore. The only thing that really still interested me in GW2 were the events and the thought that things would be more dynamic than previous MMOG titles… and seeing how the company responds to a fumble like this does not inspire me to feel great amounts of hope for future events. All companies make mistakes, but how they respond to those mistakes is as important as anything. How they handled it was a token “We will look into it” post and then nothing. It should have been job one on Monday to figure out what they are planning to do about it, or at least to do more in terms of damage control.

This could have been spun into a PR positive by giving more updates and a very quick response, as well as giving out world-wide rewards to everyone. Imagine if, as a kind of apology gift, they gave every one who logged in during the event 100 free gems, or a BLTC key, or a Consortium Chest? Then, on top of that they spend all day Monday figuring out how to “make right” the issues with people who were unable to finish the Ancient Karaka event, posting about it multiple times so that customers knew they were getting some attention paid to them. All of a sudden, they go from looking like just another gaming company to one that really cares about its fanbase. This would have likely received a high degree of praise from the gaming press and been touted as how a developers should handle a bad situation. Their losses would be negligible, and the long term return on investment in terms of customer goodwill would be highly profitable.

In the end, I feel disappointed. Anet is not a bad company, but they are not showing themselves to be great company either. Honestly, I play these games for fun, and I have gotten a lot out of this particular title… but as the time passes without a reply or any sort of real solution offered… the more I am finding my desire to continue on in Tyria is waning. This is just my opinion of course, and I offer it in the hopes that someone on the Anet team will read it and be able to use it to really improve their handling of future missteps. I also really hope that their response to this situation is enough to make me go, “Wow, was I ever wrong. I need to learn to be quiet!” Until then though, this is my opinion.

BurningLobster.1953:

This post is in regards to the issues myself and many players had when it came to fighting the final boss, and the rather underwhelming response from Anet thus far:

Due to a lack of response on the part of Anet about the Disconnect/Overflow server issues, I’ve gotten to the point where I just don’t care to play anymore. The only thing that really still interested me in GW2 were the events and the thought that things would be more dynamic than previous MMOG titles… and seeing how the company responds to a fumble like this does not inspire me to feel great amounts of hope for future events. All companies make mistakes, but how they respond to those mistakes is as important as anything. How they handled it was a token “We will look into it” post and then nothing. It should have been job one on Monday to figure out what they are planning to do about it, or at least to do more in terms of damage control.

This could have been spun into a PR positive by giving more updates and a very quick response, as well as giving out world-wide rewards to everyone. Imagine if, as a kind of apology gift, they gave every one who logged in during the event 100 free gems, or a BLTC key, or a Consortium Chest? Then, on top of that they spend all day Monday figuring out how to “make right” the issues with people who were unable to finish the Ancient Karaka event, posting about it multiple times so that customers knew they were getting some attention paid to them. All of a sudden, they go from looking like just another gaming company to one that really cares about its fanbase. This would have likely received a high degree of praise from the gaming press and been touted as how a developers should handle a bad situation. Their losses would be negligible, and the long term return on investment in terms of customer goodwill would be highly profitable.

In the end, I feel disappointed. Anet is not a bad company, but they are not showing themselves to be great company either. Honestly, I play these games for fun, and I have gotten a lot out of this particular title… but as the time passes without a reply or any sort of real solution offered… the more I am finding my desire to continue on in Tyria is waning. This is just my opinion of course, and I offer it in the hopes that someone on the Anet team will read it and be able to use it to really improve their handling of future missteps. I also really hope that their response to this situation is enough to make me go, “Wow, was I ever wrong. I need to learn to be quiet!” Until then though, this is my opinion.

I’m also hoping. I don’t even expect them to come along with a page-long posting right away, but the least they could do is a short announcement like “We heard you and we will come back to you with a blog post later this week”. But nope, instead they use their time to post Quaggan videos on Twitter.

PS: Well written post, fellow Tyrian!

BurningLobster.1953:

Due to a lack of response on the part of Anet about the Disconnect/Overflow server issues, I’ve gotten to the point where I just don’t care to play anymore. …….

This could have been spun into a PR positive by giving more updates and a very quick response, as well as giving out world-wide rewards to everyone. Imagine if, as a kind of apology gift, they gave every one who logged in during the event 100 free gems, or a BLTC key, or a Consortium Chest? Then, on top of that they spend all day Monday figuring out how to “make right” ……

the more I am finding my desire to continue on in Tyria is waning. This is just my opinion of course, and I offer it in the hopes that someone on the Anet team will readIn the end, I feel disappointed.

Anet is not a bad company, but they are not showing themselves to be great company either. Honestly, I play these games for fun, and I have gotten a lot out of this particular title… but as the time passes without a reply or any sort of real solution offered… .

BL hit all the points and said it better than i could have i wonder what happened to the wonderfull comunication that happened during beta Anet just seems to be becoming a different company from the one i knew.

communication is key lets face it it was the biggest disater in the short history of the game and we get one short half comment. That implies two things either despite the feed back Anet dont think they dropped the ball last weekend or they think if they ignore the complaining customers they will go away, well sad thing for the game they will.

cargan.5689:

or they think if they ignore the complaining customers they will go away, well sad thing for the game they will.

At the moment it seems to be exactly this case, regarding that they prefer to tweet stuff like this https://twitter.com/GuildWars2/status/270981839026536448 instead of posting something about the past days.

From the last page https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/archive/lostshores/Do-the-right-thing-and-ban-people-who-exploit/page/3#post813875

Hi all.

Due to the amount of time the event took to run on a character, swapping to another character to run the instance again on a different overflow server is not considered an exploit by the development team. While there was an extremely small chance for individuals to jump to an overflow that required little effort to complete, the majority of players participating in the final event put in a lot of time and work so as such, they were entitled to receive the same reward for completing the event again. This was designed as such to allow those players who couldn’t hop on exactly at 12 noon PST an opportunity to participate in Sunday’s event.

Thanks for your feedback, which we’ll be sure to consider for future events, but for this event, this thread and topic are closed.

Sorry but i find this a terrible blanket excuse for whats happened.

First let me state that i do not care about people running the event with multiple characters. I am concerned with the statement that says the overflow events were designed so people could run it if they missed the main event time.

If this was so, why did you patch when you did, stopping all in progress events instead of letting them finish. Some people were in the middle of killing the final boss. Others, like me had JUST gotten home from school and were excited that the events were still running.

I am finding it a common trend with Americans that they do not consider what is going on in any country but there own before they do something. For Australia you ran a one time event from 3am monday morning to about 5:30pm monday night, during an exam period, during peoples works hours, turning the event off JUST as everyone is getting home.

You did not give the oceanic community a chance to even participate. Then to turn around and pretend that you were giving people a chance to participate, when you stated that it was a one time event only, and many many people saw the time had passed, assumed they had missed it and not gotten on, completely missed out.

If this was intended to give people a chance..please answer the following questions

• Why did you not let people know there was an additional chance
• Why did you simply not let the rest of the events finish in overflows
• Are you going to continue to run events at such times that exclude to oceanic community

If nothing else, please answer the last question as it will probably determine if i want to continue playing or not.

ClanTzimisce.1269:

miniL.7361:

PS: Forgot, same as not making the event 2 long, announce it far before teh weekend with all times so people can plan and schedule for it. I understand some people might have been planning other stuff, missing parts of the event, or the whole event if they where gone for the weekend.

Actually, as far as I know, they gave a 3 week advance notice, at least that’s what I’ve read in a few of the many rant threads

Possible, but dont you think that in some cases thats still a bit late? Like when you are planning a week or weekend gone, or vacation perhaps, anything close to that would be planned up front mostly by more than 1 or 2 weeks (sure it happens you plan trips in last moment, but I am sure most of those people dont).

This was no problem for me, but I can imagine that people would want to know A.S.A.P which weekend, and then soon after the times etc so they can make sure they dont miss it when possible.

Community Coordinator; CC Dalmarus

Hi all.
Due to the amount of time the event took to run on a character, swapping to another character to run the instance again on a different overflow server is not considered an exploit by the development team. While there was an extremely small chance for individuals to jump to an overflow that required little effort to complete, the majority of players participating in the final event put in a lot of time and work so as such, they were entitled to receive the same reward for completing the event again. This was designed as such to allow those players who couldn’t hop on exactly at 12 noon PST an opportunity to participate in Sunday’s event.
Thanks for your feedback, which we’ll be sure to consider for future events, but for this event, this thread and topic are closed.

I wanted to update on the main lost shore feedback thread in case there were any individuals who misunderstood the situation and wanted someone from the development team to clarify it to them and missed out on reading the archive response.

Hope it helps clear somethings and hope we can all be more friendly in the coming days.

Nah, still doesn’t account for a statement/apology/road ahead, etc.
I think what the whole thread comes down to in a TL;DR version is:

- Nice idea, poorly implemented
- “They already bought the game, so we can just be silent until the next event”
- Can I haz more communication?

absolutely amazing, the event was great aside from the expected lag. the new content is challenging, dynamic, and fun.

thank you.

critickitten.1498:

If we’re to trust their released numbers from the betas, concurrency figures account for ~40% of their playerbase.

Uh, you apparently did not read the article you quote.

It certainly says 400k concurrent users, but it doesn’t say anything about how many users were active during that time. It says over one million pre-orders not counting the one-day pre-orders. All you can logically deduce from that is that there were less than 40% of the players online at the time. Since I know a bunch of people who purchased one-day pre-orders, I would speculate this number is decently below 40%

Furthermore, when ANet sent out the press release saying they hit 2 million users, they were still reporting 400k peak concurrent users. This tells us current peak concurrent user count is somewhere under 20%.

Personally, I invite ANet to look at the numbers. Look at how many people missed the event. Look at how much those people have spent on the game since launch and decide if they really want to put that income at risk by designing more content that excludes that population. It’s their game and their decision, but I bet there is a pretty compelling business argument there for not repeating this mistake.

Amusing addition. While I did know about event anywys, I just finally recieved the email telling me about the ancient karka. This is the 20th, it shows as one day old so it probably showed up last night after I logged out. So umm, the 19th I get a mail telling me about an event that ended the 18th? I am leaving this mail non deleted in my box for now.
This may be why some peopel didn’t know details about it.

hoyasaxa.1974:

critickitten.1498 said:
“Unless you have a good in-world explanation for how a lighthouse can be destroyed, re-built, and destroyed again twelve times in a day? Or how about the massive amounts of destruction that were necessary to drive the ancient karka back into his lair?

Face it, sometimes having something happen ONCE is the only way it’s going to make sense. You can rationalize it as being all about the players and maybe that’s fair to say, but you can’t possibly rationalize it from any sort of in-the-world sense. And that’s precisely why they’re doing one-time events in the first place: to make changes to the world that people can witness and say “I was there”."

Or, create a cinematic that shows the destruction of the lighthouse that plays when a character logs into the area. A further cinematic later on can show the rebuilding, if needed. Something like this would allow the storyline of the event to still occur, at a time when the player logs in. This would then include ALL players in the event, rather than the select few that were able to attend at the scheduled time. Many players in Europe would not have been able to attend due to the event starting late on a Sundey evening. Many players in Asia and Australia could not attend due to the event starting early on a Monday morning. All of those players were excluded from the event entirely, did not get the CHANCE to attend, participate or a shot at any of the rewards.

critickitten.1498:

eisberg.2379:

Not having 1 time event is not any where near throwing out one of their manifesto promises. And the Shatterer isn’t the only one, there are plenty of other “bosses” that respawn that have no lore reason to respawn, but they do any ways.

Point one out. No, really. Find me one world boss in the game that matches the exact same profile as the Ancient Karka. Please, by all means, make my day with this. I’ll wait.

And yes it is a minority. In any other MMO, it has always been anywhere from 20-30% that play during the same 4 hour period, the other 70-80% are playing during the other 20 hours. This is the reason why having a 1 time event is a bad idea in an MMO, especially if they plan to do this every time. It will turn anyone who doesn’t play during the prime time into second class citizens, even though they pay the same amount of money.

If we’re to trust their released numbers from the betas, concurrency figures account for ~40% of their playerbase.

http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/08/28/guild-wars-2-hits-400k-concurrent-users-before-launch/

Assuming that the figure has dropped off (which it likely has), that’s still a very large portion of the playerbase online at the same time. Enough that entire servers crashed during the finale event from being overloaded.

Again, please stop throwing around that “minority” word as if it’s only 10% or less, when all data to the contrary indicates it clearly isn’t.

Arenanet is literally saying that the Prime Time people are more important then their paying customers who can’t play during the prime time, and this will have a trickle effect, in the long run, like less content being made for the game because of potential loss of revenue. It is already bad enough that the non prime time people have a hard enough time finding group, so do they really need to be punished with less content from these events just because Arenanet feels they are not important enough?

So yes, I actually do feel that 1 time events is bad for the health of the game, and I love this game.

I can guarantee you that there will be less content being made eventually whether players drop off or not, because quite frankly this event’s many massive bugs prove that ANet cannot maintain this monthly pace of patching in giant amounts of new content.

Also, how are non-prime-time people being punished by ANet? They’re not being punished. You’re mistaking punishment with reward, they are not interchangeable terms. Prime time folks are being rewarded for dedicating several hours of their time to an event that required them having to manipulate their schedules to be there. Non-prime-time players are not being punished just because they CAN’T be there.

I’ve had teachers who gave the entire class a piece of candy on specific days that most students loved to skip on, or who would give extra credit to the kids who show up. Are the kids who skipped being “punished” in any way? No, not at all, they just missed out on what amounts to free goodies.

When a band schedules a concert for a particular date and time, are people unable to make that concert being “punished” for their inability to rearrange their schedule? Nope. It might suck to miss out, but that sort of thing happens in the real world. And I doubt the band has to worry about people never buying their albums again just because some folks missed that one concert, either. Because, strangely enough, people in the real world seem a bit more grounded in reality than some of the people in here. >_>

Rewarding one group of people is NOT the same thing as punishing everyone who wasn’t part of that group. Everyone was given an opportunity, and everyone who showed up was rewarded for having to schedule themselves so that they were able to attend (except the folks who got DCed, who do deserve fair compensation for missing out). If you didn’t make it, yes I agree that it sucks, but it happens. Please be mature about it and move on, or at least be constructive in disagreeing with the company’s policy. Too many here are just whining and it’s rather disgusting in all honesty.

I would have loved to have had the CHANCE to attend. I could not, however, because the final event started at 7am Monday morning. If the event had some recurring aspects to it, maybe through the use of cinematics shown at varying stages (like when first loggin in and going to Lion’s Arch), portions of the battle being instanced, etc, then the event would have included ALL PLAYERS instead of the only the portion that were able to be there at the scheduled time. The player-base is global, and there needs to be opportunities for those outside the US to be able to attend, participate and have a chance at potential rewards. As this event occured, many did not even have that opportunity.

I really don’t like the fact that the rewards were such impacting rewards. I wasn’t able to participate in the event, and now that many friends who have, are waving around their 20 slot boxes, and a select few with precursors. It makes me feel like I’m falling behind, just because I wasn’t able to participate in an event. I think cosmetic rewards would have been a much better idea.

Ok, I am going to try to respond to this piecemeal, forgive me if I miss a few points. I am not really going to address the issue you seem to have with repeated content. I have run CoF path 2 about 50 times, and the game is not broken for me. Even if this Lost Shores event ran 3 times per server, the world would not end. From an IC standppoint, you can only kill the giant crab monster once, same as Zhaitan. It hurts nothing for more people to be able to experience content. You disagree. That is fine. I think you would find that a majority of the playerbase agrees with me, but I have no scientific data to back me up. Since you don’t either, we can leave it at that.

As for the drops, you say that the items in the chest were merely uniquely skinned items. By “uniquely skinned items,” I meant an item of no in game monetary value, but something of cosmetic value. Bragging rights, if you will. A 20 slot bag has in game monetary value, and provides a lasting advantage to the player who has it. A glowing pet crab carrying a surfboard (since, you know, its a resort) would be a uniquely skinned item, by my definition.

As for my suggestion, here is what I am getting at. The goal for FUTURE events should be to have a higher percentage attendance with lower concurrency. Here was my suggestion again:

A proposed solution: if Guild Wars II is committed to such events only happening once ever, make the event an instance that can be run solo, duo, or in any size group. Make the instance scale in difficulty to the number of people who participate in it. And make it accessible once per account, period. Make the instance available for 24 hours if having it done and complete on all possible accounts in one day is of vital importance to the structure of the game.

Concurrent users in the same server with unikittenfects and movement create problems like lag, FPS drops, culling, etc. By allowing the “instance” to be run for 24 hours, ANet would have much higher attendance with lower concurrency, meaning less server load and lag, and more happy customers. Besides, this event would have been way cooler if I could have run it with 4 of my guildies like a mini dungeon, even if it lasted 3+ hours. Like I said, I was there, but got the boot, not the loot. I did get a huge repair bill, so I guess I get bragging rights for that.

I would love to hear some real feedback on this suggestion. And please critickitten, refrain from using the words “whine” and “cry” or any derivation thereof when replying to me. I am doing neither, as you acknowledged, and using those words makes an otherwise reasoned argument seem petty and entitled.

As for ANet keeping their promises, what about this one?

“We feel that everyone should have the ability to contribute no matter what time of the day it is. How we’ve came to this conclusion is that no player’s time is more valuable than another. Everyone has different off peak hours for whatever reason. Players should not be punished or unable to experience and view the same content as everyone else because they play at a different time. They too are paying customers.”

Ashlar.2519:

I would have loved to have had the CHANCE to attend. I could not, however, because the final event started at 7am Monday morning. If the event had some recurring aspects to it, maybe through the use of cinematics shown at varying stages (like when first loggin in and going to Lion’s Arch), portions of the battle being instanced, etc, then the event would have included ALL PLAYERS instead of the only the portion that were able to be there at the scheduled time. The player-base is global, and there needs to be opportunities for those outside the US to be able to attend, participate and have a chance at potential rewards. As this event occured, many did not even have that opportunity.

Here’s the core problem:

How do you create a model whereby every player in every time zone has a “chance” to participate WITHOUT getting rid of the one-time event model?

The only way I can see that working out is if they designate specific servers for each time zone, and have the event occur at an exact time in each time zone (for example, 3:00 PM in that time zone). Which just sounds like them investing a heck of a lot of money and effort into rearranging their server structure (again) for what likely amounts to relatively little gain. And that doesn’t even bring the problem of overflow servers into the discussion, either.

The only real way for them to keep their existing model is to pick a time and ask everyone to try to make it to that time. Otherwise, they have to abandon it. And while I suppose I am not 100% against such a thing, I will say that it seems to completely abandon the idea of the world “evolving and changing” in any way if every single world boss can be repeatedly killed. I wouldn’t quit the game over it or anything but I would certainly lament its loss.

Since this is the Lost Shores Feedback Thread, perhaps a link to the Lost Shores survey would be in order?

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/eGW2LostShores_en

Well, the survey restored at least some of my hope and faith into ArenaNet. What’s still missing though is an official statement.

I was expecting a box in the survey to add comments, so I’ll just do that here.

I thought the 1-time event thing was a neat idea, so I logged on Friday at noon to participate in it. And then everything crawled to a halt and I couldn’t target things, monsters died before they appeared on my screen, and I pretty much sat looking at other people killing things for an hour. And I should note that this isn’t due to my computer being crappy, since it handles GW2 (and other more intensive games) just fine. Everyone and their brother was in Lion’s Arch, in the same small area, and (it seems) the servers couldn’t handle it.

But whatever, there’s more to the event, right? I got some quests, which were hard to keep track of since there’s no real quest log or anything in the game, and went to talk to people, picked up crap from the beach, etc. Then I got to the Sylvari guy in the town by the coast, and saw someone kill him, so I waited for him to respawn. And I waited some more. After an hour or so I logged out and came back later in the afternoon. This time he was here, but when I talked to him nothing happened.

So I logged out and didn’t bother to come back for the rest of the event.

Takeaways

• If there are going to be quests other than the main story quests, there should be a system to handle them. Right now there isn’t.
• NPC interaction issues should be resolved before the event starts.
• Maybe instead of just hundreds of monsters appearing everywhere at once and everyone furiously clicking hoping to hit one, figure out another way to do a massive event.

Anyway like I said I think it was a cool idea, and if not for the technical issues it would have been fun.

It occurred to me…i think the two main issues were poor implementation of rewards and the fact that the finale had disconnect issues and for me at least, was frustrating just to get the finale.

I trust arenanet has learned from their mistakes and future events will be better.

Also I think its unreasonable that some people expect no more one time events and/or for them to get rid of ascended.

The ascended gear is meant to bridge the gap between exotics and legendary.. Some people may not want to put in the time it takes to get a legendary so this is for them. Also its not really needed to enjoy the game…even the new dungeon! Right now it is only needed for one area of the game and for later levels of the new dungeon.

Also it is unreasonable to expect them to stop one time events. I like the one time events and think they should still do them but they could use tweaking. If they are going to have rewards like the chest at the end of the lost shores finale. they should give people at least 24 hours to partipate and get the reward or make it like the mad kings dungeon where people will just miss an environmental change.

In one event, many people managed to get precursor items that i had to farm cursed shore for a month STRAIGHT to afford. Anet released the event right at oceanic sleeptime even though they sold the product internationally.

This is the biggest FU given to me by any game ever. As much as i appreciate the amount of content this game has developed, seeing no signs of response from anet regarding this issue of population exclusion, i seriously wonder if the ones leading the dev team have lost their direction, or simply your coy doesnt give a crap about to oceanics(slotting precursor drops into oceanic sleeptime? apparently you never gave a kitten about what u were doing to the excluded population). Oceanics need to be warned about certain exclusionary features of this product you are selling.

Additional feedback after the survey.

1. there wasn’t a space for more clarifications in the survey, esp. on the final event. :^)

More to the point for this thread, basically it seemed that anyone trying to catch up was a bit stuck if they started a day late. I heard people trying to pick up some of the investigate quests saying they couldn’t do them. I had them already, so I could complete them when the NPCs were not bugged anymore the next day. Though one NPC, the memory Quaggan, was missing so you were stuck if you hadn’t talked to him before. The day before I had found him by accident while wandering around waiting to hear if the other Consortium guy in the zone got reset or fixed.

For the ancient Karka in the survey I said both I’d like a one time even and for it to be multiple times. I liked the idea of it being one final fight but it seems like ideally it would be better to have the feeling of a one time event. With the overflow setup basically it’s like each server had multiple kills anyway, so even people on the same server didn’t share in a unique one time event. (say the opening of Ahn’Qiraj comes to mind, but with no overflows lots of people lagged out or locked out of the server, etc. etc.)

Limit the event to one time for the account perhaps, but let those who missed it within a reasonable window join a special overflow to do the event or something similar once the initial events are over. You’d still have the feeling of a non repeatable one time event but allow more of the audience to have that special experience.

On another subject, the instructions for donating were a bit lacking in game, you have a person by the mystic forge who knows stuff but won’t tell you the details. I had to find info outside the game about how to do it. When I did try a bit, blue items weren’t being taken, seemingly green or above would. None of the NPCs said you need 3 of a certain quality or full stacks of materials/food. If you are seeking contributions limiting in this way seems odd from a story perspective, even if it’s clear from the usual game mechanics one. And adding a wrapper seemed to me like it might be a different mechanic and I initially thought one wrapper per item.

1. The one time event overall was a disaster.
On Friday when things got started there were so many people there were multiple major issues.
a. Latency
b. Graphics draw. Players and/or mobs were not being rendered.
c. Dynamic events bugged. This prevented the scavenger hunt/quest chain from being completed because by the next day parts were no longer accessable.
d. Auto attacking is no fun. Because of the latency that essentially all you could do.
e. maybe 1 in 10 mobs actually dropped any sort of loot.

2. I skipped the event on saturday because of the previous days issues.
a. As mentioed previously the scavenger hunt/quest chain was bugged from the previous day. If you had not been able to complete it, it was impossible to continue or start the chain.
b. The new zone is nice. The layout makes it interesting to try to navigate the mobs are difficult. It really feels like an outdoor dungeon zone. (HINT make outdoor group only zones)

3. The final event was plagued by issues as well.
a. Latency
b. Graphics draw. Players and/or mobs were not being rendered. This would often result in instant death because you were being attacked and could not see the mobs/attacks.
c. Auto attacking is no fun. Because of the latency that essentially all you could do.
d. maybe 1 in 10 mobs actually dropped any sort of loot.
e. The chest reward were a nice supprise. 20 slot bag, nice. Accessory, nice. Couple of exotics and rares, nice.

4. IF your going to do “one time events” I would stongly suggest:
a. Running the event in “event” zones (eg, like an overflow zone).
b. Once a player has complete the event their account is flagged and then go to the “normal” zone.
c. Run the event multiple times during the day and for multiple days.

5. The new dungeon fractal of the Mysts (FotM) is quite well done.
a. Each path feels quite unique and is interesting and fun to play.
b. I get the “infinite dungeon” idea. But I am not sure I Am sold on the execution here. It seems to be fragmenting the player base more than its bringing it together.

6. Ascended gear appears to be a 180 from what you, the developers, stated what players should expect when we play Guild Wars 2.

In case you forgot what you stated players should expect, let me remind you:
http://www.arena.net/blog/guild-wars-2-design-manifesto

So if you love MMORPGs, you should check out Guild Wars 2. But if you hate traditional MMORPGs, then you should really check out Guild Wars 2. Because, like Guild Wars before it, GW2 doesn’t fall into the traps of traditional MMORPGs. It doesn’t suck your life away and force you onto a grinding treadmill; it doesn’t make you spend hours preparing to have fun rather than just having fun.

But it looks like thats EXACTLY what you are doing. Turning GW2 into a traditional MMO gear grind included.

7. Excellent communication skills required.
There are many unanswered questions which leads to rampant speculation.

8. I swore I would NEVER make a post on the official forums again but here I am doing it anyway. This game has so much potential. It would be a shame to see it go to waste. I guess I will just have to eat the infractions for being critical of how things were.

I really didnt enjoi this event.

1) Huge lags. Phase one was unplayable for me.
2) No rewards for Phase 1 and 2. No annoucement about rewards. Phase 2 was still lagy but playable. So I tryed it for 2 hours but no rewards at end.
3) I tryed Phase 3 for one hour, same progress as phase 2 so I suggest its not worth my time. No rewards announced! Still lags. So I decided to release me from pain and went do something else.

What was my surprise second day when friend told me reward was huge. And huge I mean epic huge. Chance for drop worth hundreds of gold?
And its not all, there were paths to expoloit chest, open with alts or open more due overflow. Fantastic!

Well, I feel little bit cheated now.

Only one thing is very nice. Fractal dungeon is best idea ever. Very easy to add content and scaled difficulty is great. Everyone can find its own level. Character bound tickets is not so good way.

And btw dc during dungeon run is still pretty stupid. Why player cant return to dungeon? One dc can screw whole run in any dungeon. Same for fractals. Its pretty weird solution…

I dislike:
-) one time event, I was there by accident. I didn’t hear about it because I didn’t play 24/7 on that weekend and was kind of surprised when I found the big raid going for the boss.
-> my friends didn’t get this either, most of them weren’t there
-> no second chance for them

-) really bad lag issues. It wasn’t only me, chat was full of hate because of this. It got a bit better in the finale, but still awful. This is when I’m glad that my friends missed it. I’d love to see a open beta for such events a week before the actual event.

I liked:
-) those anti-zerg attacks from the ancient karka which killed a whole bunch of guys in an instant… I like this. It was a difficulty-setting I would love to see in meta-event chains like the Shatterer. Absolutely fantastic, I really wasn’t sure in the end if we would make it, tons of people on the ground…

-) love the new jumping puzzle and pvp map. Really hard JP where I had to give up in the end. It’s great, now I have something to work on.
-) the PvP Map seems interesting with all the different paths.

Event was pretty awesome. Bugs made the story and such pretty much unavailable, but the big fights with the Karka, especially the Ancient were really great! Some lag for me but nothing major. Would be nice to see these events timed better for oceanic players since 5am isn’t really my favorite time to start participating in events :P Thanks for the good content!

I didn’t get to play as I work weekends. Ascended gear aside (since I hate it and everything it represents), I think the one time event is a good idea as long as it isn’t a one time event. By this, I mean that it should be spread out through out the week with several identical quests and/or instances so that it seems more like an extended battle as opposed to a skirmish, and allowing for others who have non-traditional work schedules to play the events as well. Of course, this won’t pertain to me anymore since I’ve lost the desire to play after TLS went live. Too many changes and broken promises for this 7+ year GW1 vet.

The following are my two cents regarding one-time events.

I would prefer that ‘one-time’ events use the build phasing demonstrated in patch updates already, in combination with an account-wide tag. Basically, have one-time events repeat, but prohibit repeat completion of the event.

The event would repeat every 3-6 hours or whatever, but in different overflow instances. Players that had already fought the Ancient Karka would be directed to a post-Ancient Karka instance. Players that had not yet fought the Karka would be shuttled into an overflow where the event had not happened yet.
So, everybody gets to fight it once, preserving the important world-changing feeling associated with one-time events – but without the timezone discrimination of actual one-time events.

Couple this with making sure to reward players who, for whatever reason, got their account tagged as ‘has-fought-Karka’ without getting rewarded and I’d be a very happy customer.
For extra bonus points, link this account tag to other zones so they phase in the same way.

Vitriol.2495:

The following are my two cents regarding one-time events.

I would prefer that ‘one-time’ events use the build phasing demonstrated in patch updates already, in combination with an account-wide tag. Basically, have one-time events repeat, but prohibit repeat completion of the event.

The event would repeat every 3-6 hours or whatever, but in different overflow instances. Players that had already fought the Ancient Karka would be directed to a post-Ancient Karka instance. Players that had not yet fought the Karka would be shuttled into an overflow where the event had not happened yet.
So, everybody gets to fight it once, preserving the important world-changing feeling associated with one-time events – but without the timezone discrimination of actual one-time events.

Couple this with making sure to reward players who, for whatever reason, got their account tagged as ‘has-fought-Karka’ without getting rewarded and I’d be a very happy customer.
For extra bonus points, link this account tag to other zones so they phase in the same way.

Problem here is that players that join late have to do the events almost alone. A solution would be to still allow players that have already finished it to help. Those players then just don’t get a 2nd reward.

I was just curious what the progress is on the Final Event loot that a lot of people were not able to par-take on due to disconnect failures and timing issues. I for one was disconnected 4 times and sent to 4 different servers one of which didnt have enough people to even make a dent in the event, thus losing hope after 2 or 3 hours of mind blowing frustration. I was strolling the forums and have not seen any updates on it yet, am I missing out?

Dealt with bad lag. Very unhappy that I was at the event from the very start, and was at the very end when I got disconnected and was unable to get my rewards for fighting all that time. Bit of a turn off when it comes to future events. Here’s to hoping they can work out a system to give us something in return.

At the end of the Lost Shores Survey, in the section “rate the following statements from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree,” we were basically given the option between, “Should the final battle with the ancient Karka occur only once? Or should it occur multiple times?” Having to choose between the two, I favored the battle occurring multiple times, but that really isn’t my favorite option.

What I would prefer to see is the event occurring only once for each player, but with a window of opportunity (say 24 hours) where players can choose to participate in the event. So you could get some of that “world-changing, one-time event” feel while making the event more conveniently accessible to a larger portion of the playerbase.

Of course to do this, you’d probably have to instance the event. But with the horrible culling issues and lag most of us experienced, I’m not really seeing a negative there.

Also, thanks to ANet for sending this survey out. I appreciate you guys taking our feedback seriously, and your willingness to change to make the game better.

I feel like I should hug you now. But I won’t. Because Colin Johanson’s beard tickles.

I’m reposting this, since the Lost Shores forum has been closed and I have no idea whether the developers have seen this post or not.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/archive/lostshores/Lost-Shores-Creating-Winners-vs-Losers/first

Some of GW2’s best features came from rethinking MMO conventions to promote inclusiveness and cooperative play. For example, automatically sharing credit for monster kills, individual loot drops and individual gathering nodes. These allow everyone to “win”, rather than create some winners and some losers.

This way of thinking was absent from the Ancient Karka event chain. First, it was implemented as a “one-time” event that lasted several hours. I mentioned this already in an earlier thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/lostshores/No-One-Time-Events-We-re-Paying-Customers/first

Second, completing the event rewarded some players with legendary precursors, creating some huge winners. The level of rewards here were completely disproportionate to anything else in the game so far. Whether you finish a World Event chain or run a dungeon, you’d be extremely lucky to get even a single exotic.

Together, these two factors created a lot of losers. If you live in the wrong time zone, you lose. If you were busy that day, you lose. If you quit halfway due to lag and/or frustration, you lose. If you got disconnected and couldn’t get back to a shard with an active event chain, you lose. If you “only” got L78 exotic drops from the the Ancient Karka chest, you lose. That’s a lot of losers. And people don’t want to play GW2 to feel like losers. Everyone wants to feel like a winner.

Rolling back the servers isn’t an option, so what can be done so that more people “win”?

(1) Design future World Events to allow everyone to participate. Some ideas that have come up on the forums include running the events multiple times over a day or week, or implementing some kind of instancing or phasing. At the absolute minimum, one time events should not give out the most valuable items on the TP.

(2) Find other ways to give everyone a much better shot at legendary precursors and make other activities more rewarding. For example, buff the drops from other event chains, such as the Orrian temples, to match the Ancient Karka event. Buff the dungeon rewards further to give at least one rare or exotic per run, or perhaps a bag of Tier 6 crafting materials.

This is just my 2 cents. You can cater to the people who feel like winners only if others lose, or the people who don’t care if other people lose as long as they have a good time. But I’d much rather play a GW2 in which everyone can win.

Thank you.

The event in itself: was essentially great, even if the last part was a bit too messy because of all the people in there. For the ones unable to join the last part, or worse, were disconnected while they were playing, it’s frustrating to say the least.

I’m not exactly fond of ONE TIME ONLY events, because, well, if you miss them it’s forever and even the most hardcore gamers have sometimes big things IRL they can’t postpone. But I can see where the problem would lie in an attempt to make something supposed to be as marking as this one and at the same time, make it repeatable. On the other hand (or maybe the same one but another part, i don’t know), there is a real problem with those OTOE: the bugs. there will always be some at the beginning of a new content, and when this content is limited in time, a lot of people will be driven crazy because they were there but couldn’t finish it when they were online.

One thing i really don’t appreciate, it’s not knowing the exact time limit for things. If I can understand the uncertainty for something like the fight of the Ancient Karka, why can’t you say when Lionsguard Lyns will go in greener pastures ?

The new map: is gorgeous, even if i find it a bit empty… Maybe it’s just the background that makes it look like that, but even the cursed shore seems more lively.

The jumping puzzles are nice, but seriously guys, why do you keep obliging people to run in there ? I’m one of those that couldn’t finish the clockwork tower during the Halloween event because I need to ponder my jumps (from what i heard while waiting for it to reboot, i’m not the only one. And I could hear a lot of people in 5 days), and it’s infuriating to miss again and again and again because you couldn’t stop and aim properly…

The soundtrack: In all honesty, I don’t particularly remember it. That means it’s good enough to not hurt my ears even after 3 days in the same map.

My constructive criticism on the Lost Shores Event.

• When you do large invasions with a high player population like you did in LA, then reduce the max amount of players then normally allowed. This may give a nice buffer into lag issues and make the event more enjoyable. I would even recommend a server(s) solely dedicated for the creation of holiday overflow zones.

*Be more mindful of the overflow’s tendency to start on as a clean slate. The Ancient Karka event was interacting with the “establishment of Southsun” chain from Phase 2, adding unnecessary NPCs and mobs, further causing more lag and instability issues. There were also issues of the Ancient Karka repeating on overflows and people exploiting overflows to get chest rewards on alts when the alts didn’t do the event themselves.

*Extend one-time only events to last a week with each phase lasting a couple days. If you really really want to make the last phase only viewable once per character, then make it instanced or lock characters that have completed it out. This can allow you to run the final phase for 1-2 days while still giving that sense of happening once per character.

*The new zone was beautiful but the amount of DE was lacking for a level 80 zone after the establishment events took place. This place wasn’t as enjoyable to just run around and kill things like the Mad King’s Labyrinth was either, since the drop rate was rather low.

*Ancient Karka event was “too long.” This is in regard to the repetitive nature of certain phases (reinforcements). Players don’t mind spending 2 to 3 hours on an event chain as long as it stimulates their brain. Killing waves of one enemy type for 20-30 minutes then doing the exact same thing 15 minutes later is taxing. An epic fight isn’t due to it’s length or a boss’s HP pool, but due to the mechanics. Apply the clever balance of Fractal puzzle/difficulty/encounters/coordination to DEs and champion boss encounters.

I’m not sure if this has already been mentioned, but perhaps ANet could have sent out an email that invited players to participate in the one time event…that way, if you don’t read the forums or haven’t played in a while, you would still know about it.

I think the concept of these events is a nice thought, although I would suggest they be longer so folks can actually do them regardless of when they can actually log onto the game.

The Southsun area is lovely, but very, very empty. The Karka are a bit difficult if you find one jumping at you as you round a boulder and find he has brought friends to the party you did not expect. Unless in a party, this is a definite way point journey.

The time I spent with friends exploring the area was a bit disappointing. We were able to navigate successfully around mobs as long as we knew where they were, but unintentionally aggroed said mob’s cousin on the other side of the mound we did not see and, oh, look, he is bringing his brother to the party as well who is from the beach down the hill.

As funny as that sounds that is what happened and we eventually decided to do some climbing which actually gave us a breather until we ran into old Champion there beyond that waterfall. ooops.

Found the Ranger Reef Drake accidentally, which we thought we had missed. However, it was fortunate there were a bunch of other folks too, so it was easier to obtain a Juvenile after the Champion boss was down who was protecting them.

Drop rate for loot is abysmal in this area by the way. I think I only got crab meat and some shells. I also only found a few (very few) harvesting nodes of any type as well. So farming in this area for much of anything else does not appear to be an option.

The concept of driving the Ancient Karka in a running battle was great – but poorly executed; enemy health scaling issues, culling, overly long and far too many “reinforcement” phases.

That said I would like to see it as a repeating event in the future (similar to the world dragons) if it was tuned properly. Otherwise it seems like the zone will mostly go to waste.

The island has wonderful visuals but the drop rates are horrendous and the mobs far too difficult to justify said poor loot. It needs a draw to keep people visiting after their initial exploration.

Good Ideas:
—The ratings for dungeons was a good idea, but I thought it had too many tiers. At the time I play it is hard enough to find a group for a dungeon let alone one that had 20+ possibilities. With out a proper in game party finding tool you need to seriously reduce the number of possible tiers.

The new area looked nice and the new monsters were challenging to fight.

The ranger pet looks sweet.

—I thought the new dungeon was intersting, but it was plauged with DCs.

Bad
—-Time not spent adding a real party finding tool. This would be time spent on something everyone can use every day.

—One time events. If you are going to take the time to add an event to the game, why only run it one time. To me that seems like a waste of developer’s time.

Released before it was ready. The dungeon and event seemed beta quality. There were lots of DCs and crashes.

New Dungeon
I love the new dungeon – Fractals! It was really fun. The only problem I have is when a party member disconnects, they’ve lose their progress. Also, the remaining party might experience more difficulty because they lost a member. We also needed an LFG tool for this one, AND some players didn’t want to invite people with lower fractal levels because they can’t progress to the next level. If they did, they’re like wasting they’re time, probably. So I guess that created a problem.

One Time Events
I love one time events btw because I think they’re awesome and make this game unique. I haven’t attended Phases 1 and 2 though because they were 4AM my time. I didn’t bother much about them since the rewards were just so-so, and I heard the events were kidna buggy and laggy, so I was kinda happy I didn’t stay up late or wake up too early for it.

The Phase 3 one was a different story. The only problem I have is the kind of reward they give out in this one-time event. I think you shouldn’t give these shinies in one-time events where not everyone will have the equal chance to get it (esp. the chance of getting a precursor) – or in other words, equal chance to roll the dice. Please don’t punish some players, esp. the Oceanic community, just because the event went at 4AM our time.

Like one player said in the forums: The expensive items people got from it was just rubbing salt in the wound for the players who couldn’t make it. Not nice.

I wasn’t upset about people getting precursors, because I know they just got really lucky. I was just upset that you put this reward wherein not all people can attend. Also, it would save us lil time to farm and lil silvers or golds to spend for the 20 slot bag and the accessory.