Guild Wars 2

Feedback in this thread and not the others. Ok.

Your new players.
I have no idea who thought of no exp, no karma, no loot, extremely grindy and meager tokens and a gold cost for the rewards but they were not thinking of the new players with this event. Your new players trying out this game, who come to a hyped up event in a zone they can play in are hit with
a) no exp to help them level.
B) No drops to sell.
C) No karma to buy karma gear.
D) And then if they do get enough blossoms, not enough gold to buy the good stuff. What are they supposed to do? Grind for blossoms and beg in map chat for gold to get something? When my account was a month or 2 old, I didn’t have 10 or 25 silver to spend like that, much less 10 gold.

Badly, badly designed for vets. Way too much grinding to get enough to buy with gold one of the better rewards, and we had better not want 2 of them, such as the Scarlet shoulders and gloves.

Design promotes selfish play. Why not have an individual reward with each single event based on gold, silver, or bronze and a group reward on how many events per map were done. At least those who DC will get the individual rewards and each event giving rewards based on gold/silver/bronze will slow people tagging and running off. A mixed personal/group reward will encourage sticking to events and splitting up to do as many events for the group as possible.

Drops. None is a bad idea. They cover waypoint costs if nothing else and doing a half hours work to see an empty inventory is not a reward. It’s an unreward. A disincentive.

No karma. I don’t know what the game has against karma rewards now but removal of karma rewards that we are going to need for the merchants in the new area is a bad idea.

imo the question uppermost in the minds of the designers of this event was, the economy. What will be the impact on the economy? The very last thing they were concerned about was, is it fun?

I assume you have reasons for why the mobs shouldn’t drop loot/XP; I can even guess at what some of them might be, although, I don’t think I agree with the decision. However, I really feel an event in low-level zones, aimed at new players, should at least have XP gains. (Frankly, I think XP gains should be a universal feature of all non-ambient kills.)

Also, while the decision to not have mob drops is more understandable, it really makes the event feel less rewarding. Even if we had no problems with the overall reward structure, having mob drops make me feel like I’m getting something for my time in the midst of the event, instead of at that end. It’s a psychological thing, but I think it’s important.

Finally, as many others have said, the time/reward scale seems way off. It makes the event (and rewards) seem basically undoable for anyone who can’t just sit in game for most of the weekend.

That being said, mistakes happen. Thanks for acknowledging the issues here, and taking feedback on how to hopefully avoid them in the future!

It’s okay, Gaile, we still love ya.

I’m not sure why this event is giving the devs such fits…remember Scarlet’s invasions? That was a much larger, more complex event and more widespread in the gameworld, and I don’t recall such problems.

Maybe, in the future, just have loot drop off the enemies rather than this reward system? That seems to have been the problem here.

Pros:

• The rewards offered at the vendor are very appealing and on point. Items that were available at previous events (but difficult to obtain) or that were previously in the gem store feel like they’re worth working toward during a limited time event. I’d like to see more of that in the future.
• The substantial daily reward of 20 blooms per map is helping discourage grinding and balances the rewards for casual players.

Cons:

• The lack of gold and experience drops, coupled with very little information on how the reward system works, is especially punishing to new players. This is the worst imaginable way to introduce the fresh F2P population to the living story.
• Tagging events is the most efficient way to earn blooms, and in order to get the top reward for 20 events in 30 minutes, tagging is the only option. It has created a perverse incentive to leech off of the efforts of other players, which I don’t think was the intent when this was designed.
• You’ve already proven with the Silverwastes breach and the evacuation of Lion’s Arch that total map accomplishment is a better metric to go by for map-wide events. It discourages zerging and promotes organized play. Why aren’t you doing it here? I can even see the event totals being tracked during the Brisban portion of the event (though not in Kessex or Diessa), which leads me to believe you planned to go that route, but did not finish implementing it before release.
• Disconnected players shouldn’t be screwed out of a reward. You should already be familiar with that being a regular problem in crowded events, as many already complain about it happening with world boss events. You need to design around this in the future.

Creating a system where the rewards are map-wide allows better cooperation than individual rewards, especially when it comes to completing events and tagging mobs.

I understand that individual rewards are to prevent AFKers and likewise people to get awarded for doing nothing, but pure individual rewards are as much as a mess. Maybe having a system of both map-wide and individual rewards is key in balance.

Perhaps having a threshold of completing 30% of all events completed so far gives the full reward, and completing more than 30% gives better rewards. Having tiers (0-10, 11-19, etc) gives a feeling of unfairness when you have 19 credit and still get awarded as having 11.

In regarding of event tagging, perhaps making a limit where you can only tag one event at a time would help tremendously, or having the gold/silver/bronze completion medals put in more productive use, rewarding you depending on what medal you have. (maybe both for the best effect)

Another thing to note, and to help people who D/C and otherwise disconnect, giving rewards as soon as events are completed also helps a lot. Everybody in the map gets their reward as soon as an event completes, giving at least something to people who D/C and doesn’t get to see the end. The individual rewards are given out at the end, since the stacks change during the event.

The key is to make sure approximately 60% of the rewards are map-wide, and 40% are individual participation. Getting credit and completing 30% or so of all events completed in the map gives the full individual reward, less than 30% participation then the rewards gives less, giving nothing if you fully AFK.

Oh yeah, and getting a bonus chest full of loot when an event completes would also be great, because it focuses on making sure the event is completed asap to make profits, and none of it is focused on loot sticking mobs.

AP’s are another thing that are missing from this event.

You added rewards that people want all the way up to 60,000 AP’s. However there are only 15,000 Ap’s in the game, plus dailies.

An event like this is a great chance to add in more, and keep people interested. 100 AP’s for various things in this event would be great.

Feedback:

1. I understand why the mobs don’t give loot unlike the crying of everyone else wanting it. Why do i understand? I played during the Scarlet Invasions in which it became a FAIL FARM. What does that mean? We scaling x events up to spawn champs to farm, yelled at ANYONE else on map trying to complete the phase and move on. Toxic = bad environment to play in.

Events not giving karma/xp is a mistake, lower leveler players get nothing from this event, and to everyone else we just waste money in wp costs (meaning but ppl kitten & complain about it).

2. TAG & RUN, the goal of the farmer is max efficiency considering the price of stuff on the vendor. That means the majority of ppl do JUST enough (say 2-3kills, use a cata 1-2times, throw a bomb) then move on the next event. Why do they do this? the personal buff gives the event earned and NOT the map wide clear count.

Remove the ability to get the buff up more then once. Why? have it as indicitor that you were at a event to get credit at the end. Make so map wide count is all that matters for rewards. Show that during x many events you gain x many blooms with a max out (brackets 0-5, 5-10, x).

3. Vendor Cost, given that 4/16 things are old GEMSTORE skins i can see why you want them cost more. But if farm/pricing limits you to one pair gemstore skins and nothing else for a tempt weekend event it is rage inducing. Since it forcing ppl to play one part of the game and only one part. Even then they are only able to get a choice thing vs everything over time like in other maps.

4.Time limit of the event, a long weekend with no info on will it occur again before HoT. It SHOULD be, this gives people the time to get any/all rewards with farming during a segmented time.

I’m gonna compare these events with the scarlet invasions. Rewards are not something I’m going into.

Scarlet’s Invasions consisted of more than one wave and while they were just different enemies it was enough to make them feel different. The current invasions get a little bit boring with always the same enemies and events. I don’t feel like we are progressing against the mordrem in these 30 minutes even though you created more different events which I feel are good.
One unrelated wish would be to have ballistas instead of catas where you need to press one button.

People were expecting event similar to Scarlet Invasions and I think that’s what you should take as formula for current event – despite of fact that we got Silverwastes for farming materials, bags etc., and despite of the rewards that can be obtained and which were unique once or available in gemstore (honestly I didn’t expected return of Selfless/Thoughtless potions and from what I remember these were promised to be unique and never again obtainable – sure, there’s still barrier of 450 tokens and 10 gold but it feels like you didn’t played fair with us with these – I spent many days getting Heirlooms and now people can get these potions within 3 days of farming? Meh…).

We want to feel like we’re rewarded for killing all these mobs and participating – such event could also encouraging and engaging for new players if there would be some experience reward…

For sure Blooms drop need to be increased, encounters should activate more often – to cut Waypointing costs because for now it’s another money sink. People on reddit were suggesting that in current form event doesn’t promote cooperation between players but sick grinding since you can tag mobs in one group and fly for next one. Also, consider extending whole event for few days more once you finally revoke the way how it works.

Thanks for admitting this was poor.

My two cents:

There is no reason for players to work together other than gather in one place and smash stuff randomly. No tactics at all

No loot – if you don’t want the mobs to drop anything how about a champ at the end of each vine destroyed with a chest or similar – would stop people running around the map hitting two mobs each time for the stacks.

Give bloom(s) for each vine downed – would help with disconnects etc.

I stop engaging the events as I was discouraged by the bloom per hour and the exchange rate. It’s not feasible to obtain the items I want without heavy grinding and being frustrated by unknown number of bloom rewarded.

For me personally, the only things I would like to see taken into consideration for this event going forward are:

1) at least a small amount of XP upon completion of each event for the benefit of newer players, since this seems to be primarily for them anyway. If they’re taking the time to go through these areas and events, they might as well advance their characters a bit while they’re at it.

2) a decrease to the stack requirements for maximum personal bloom rewards. As it is, the 20-stack requirement encourages a lot of tag-and-run, which kinda penalizes the people staying to actually complete events.

I feel like this has been a common problem in the past, where event structures do not actually encourage participation as intended (like tag-and-run for this event; farming aetherblade champs during Scarlet’s invasion is another example that comes to mind, which depending on your server at the time frequently led to the meta event actually failing while everyone was too busy farming.)

Personally I don’t mind the lack of direct drops from the mordrem, because it does prevent the similar issue of farming champs to the detriment of the meta event like my previous example. However, if you’re going to avoid direct drops, you have to of course make sure the blooms are awarded properly, and that enough of them are rewarded.

edit: also, a possible alternative to increasing the number of blooms rewarded, would be to make this a recurring weekend event for at least a few weeks, giving people more time to get the rewards they want.

my 2 cents, anyway

Guess I should add my 2 cents, so to speak.
In my experience the only way to get to the maximum reward (which requires 20 stacks of the event buff) is to basically hit and run. This promotes selfishness at best, and there’s no incentive at all to keep going once you reach 20 stacks.
My main issue with the event would be the number of blooms awarded, we barely get any for a lot of work, and this event’s making us spend money on using waypoints yet we get nothing in return, save for the petty amount of blooms.
Seeing how we only have a few days to farm these blooms and with the big brakes between events, the only way to get 2 armor pieces (which my sis and I are trying to go for) would take some non-stop grinding for the next 3 days.

What would probably help the most is lowering the vendor prices by a considerable amount, alternatively upping the blooms rewarded would be good too but that doesn’t make up for the time already spent.

Hope to see you guys do something about it, in the past you’ve delivered great content to us, I know most of the staff is working on HoT but I believe that this event can still be salvaged.

Run and Tag is not fair

Many people just run around and tag, and get ‘rewarded’ (the reward stack) greatly, with MINIMAL effort.

Maybe find a way to make it so people are ACTUALLY rewarded based on an Effort/Reward ratio. I don’t find it fair to see people giving minimal effort and gaining 30 stacks just by running and tagging.

Make it more challenging/Scale the difficulty slightly better

There are so many people participating that even with difficulty scaling, many players have barely any time to hit anything, so have minimal participation rating (bronze) or nothing at all.

There are potentially many work-arounds for this;

-Make it harder when there’s really a lot of people (new enemy mechanics, higher level enemies, more toughness/vitality, Enemies vulnerable to conditions but resistance to direct damage or vice-versa,

-Spawn more vets/elites/champs when a higher influx of players join an Invasion Spot

-Play with the old concept of Dynamic Calibration during the Battle of LA and the Legendary Assault Knights ; Make it so it’s actually only a LIMITED amount of players per Vine; The Legendary Assault Knights in LA had ‘dynamic calibration’ that enabled up to 50 players to actually damage them, maybe work on a similar concept to ‘invite’ (force) players to spread out to other vines, but also STAY on the vine? That would also fix the ‘run and tag’ problem where people run around to tag the event and get a stack of the reward buff.
A quick concept; Players need to hit some plant to be covered with a Red, Blue, Yellow or Purple Spore (commander tag colours) and get a buff for X minutes to be able to damage/participate only in their coloured ‘spore buff’ thing. Of course there’s a limit of 15-20 players per spore, once the player limit is reached, you can’t get the colour buff so you need to move to another Modrem Invasion Spot with a different coloured spore. Players with the specific coloured spore will only be able to participate in such coloured events, which spawn after a previous coloured event is completed fully (so no more run and tag)

Enemy Drops and Karma/Exp

I believed it was mentioned this event was also an opportunity for new players to play with others at some point, so the concept of removing drops/karma and experience from those events is not the best idea (I’m actually not sure if there’s no exp or karma, but there is no loot at all).
It feels even LESS rewarding when there’s no reward but through the unique ‘bloom’ currency. If I recall correctly, the Scarlet Invasions gave loot, exp and karma, why not the Mordrem Invasion? Would be a good opportunity for new players to also gain some stuff and more exp/karma

Reward Buff and DC’ing/Changing Map instance

Many criticized the fact that getting disconnected or changing instances of the same zone reset the reward stacks. I understand changing MAPS is fair, but losing it to a disconnection or a low populated instance to a more populated sounds unfair. I understand it can be a technical limitation too, but there has to be a way to fix this? Going to 20+ stacks and getting disconnected for X reason, not under the player’s control, only to log back with no stacks kinda hurts.

The bloom values

The event was supposed to last 4 days, with a lot of possible rewards from the blooms. There are a few problems with this:

- The bloom amount is very low. Either you save EVERYTHING for one of the potions but gain nothing else, or you buy SOME of the other possible rewards.

-Those events aim new players. New players probably aren’t as wealthy as old players; Not only do we need to use blooms, but some items also require a somewhat large amount of gold. I don’t suggest removing the gold needed to buy items, but maybe just balance everything out. Lower Gold needed, raise blooms needed, but also balance the bloom ‘drops’.

Maybe drop 3 blooms per events? 1 Bloom per Champion Slain?

Achievements!

Yes, make some achievements!
Slay 50 _
Destroy 3 Vines
Build 5 catapults
Get [the reward stack] to 5/10/20/40 (incremental achievement)
…you get the idea!
Reward some AP, maybe one or two titles, and some BLOOMS.
Good timing for new players and achievement system.

So.. is this event being extended ? You guys are still being very vague on your course of actions, matter of fact by what you said you just supported more people to not wanna play the event. Nothing you said that would happen, happened i respect the honesty regardless of how horribly late the statement was. You state nothing of time extension or anything you simply stated you screwed up and are removing more of the event because you realize how sensitive the community is at the current time.

My advice is to add achievements for every event like you did in the past. Second would be, teamwork based content where you basically have to split people between areas and the map gets reward for how well they do it together rather than solo. Queens Jubilee – The pavilion is a great example of when living world teamwork was at its best. It had bosses split in all areas and wherever people went it didnt matter because all got reward based on teamwork rather than egoistic gameplay.

I loved all your living world events up to this one. The reason why im not fond of this one is bc theres no varity in the map, no surprises, same mobs everywhere. You do the exact same thing for 30 minutes. Poor rewards for the amount of time youre there. Egoistic gameplay due to the buff. So basically turn the events into teamplay again with a map reward where everyone get the same reward of how well the map did. Like someone mentioned before, instead of the buff you could have had amount of invasions you killed (the whole map) like 25 would be bronze, 35 silver, 45 gold. Reward should have been bronze 15 blooms minimum, silver 20-30, gold 30-35.

Anyway, just look back at your old events and take the best from those and convert into your new events.

Everyone is literally saying the same improvements, please just give us a couple more days so that time invested doesnt go to complete waste

My Feedback/Thoughts About this event:

Haven’t read every single other reply so likely my thoughts will repeat what others have said in some way or another.

First off, events have always been fun, they are time limited but usually reward enough that it feels like its worth investing the time. Whereas I could otherwise be studying or outside somewhere, or any other number of productive things. GW1 events were something I always wanted to login for because I would get something that said “I was here”, or I could make enough platinum to be worth doing something repetitive.

Granted those events were primarily holiday themed events, even in GW2 we haven’t seen that to the same degree in my opinion. Yes you can probably make money off the hats but honestly it would’ve been nice to see a Ram hat instead of the backpack (and the dragon/lion mask being sold in gemstore). This event makes matters worse by not really giving anything.

1. Tag and leave seems encouraged. Stacks are an issue for all the people DCing. Instead reward based on participation per event, possibly using the Gold/Silver/Bronze.
2. Mobs should drop something. And rarely drop a Bloom. Spending 30 minutes for 30 Blooms doesn’t feel like a good time investment.
3. It would be more interesting if we could get people out of zerg mentality, the events are rather fun with a couple people. But once you get over 5-10 they are just boring.
4. More variety in the individual events, it gets tiresome and grindy when running for events and you end up at the same exact type that you just did.
5. Reward needs to be higher, 5 for 5 stacks, 10 at 10 stacks, and 15 and 20? Sure it probably discourages tag and leave a bit, but why should I spend more than 10 mins completing 5 events and just take the 5+20?
6. Other events stacking overtop, simply annoying because the sidebar fills up quickly with all of this going on.

Personally I’ve always hated zergs (except in StarCraft where they belong), so many of these open map events get boring, I stopped playing so many times during living story 1 that I only played 2-3 of the ‘episodes’ and never really gained anything for it. It would be nice to see an event like this with a capped map, that takes some amount of more strategy and teamwork. I’m thinking like triple trouble, which takes more than simply a zerg auto attacking… people actually have to work together and think.

Did it one last time and I can say that I wont be participating anymore. I get more fun and rewards out of pvping with guildies than I do running this event chain over and over.

Very Simple:

1. Experience & Karma from events and monsters
2. Blooms should be based on total map event completion
3. Stacks only count towards participation, i.e. > 5 stacks will give full rewards
4. Blooms should scale with total map event completion and given to all who have gained enough stacks to be marked as participated
5. Rewards should be attainable without grinding. Either increase blooms (based on total map event completion) or lower blooms required for rewards.

There are some negatives, like a few might go afk, but it is far better to encourage team play and show what GW2 is about rather than tag and run.

So did they cancel the invasion or is that still going?
(Posting from work, so I don’t know what’s going on)

EDIT: Also, what’ll happen to the armor skins and potions since it looks like very few ppl will be getting them through this event?

shadow.6174:

Sytherek.7689:

- The DC issue is getting worse on some systems. It is not always our internet connections.

Yeah, I know right? :S I’m struggling with it for some time now (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Wth-Constants-disconnects-and-losing-credit)

In my case, I KNOW it is not my internet connection because my partner is sitting right next to me playing at the same time and not getting DC’d. I play on a Mac, he plays on a PC. I have always had more DC issues than him, but they have been exponentially worse since the Sept 4 beta weekend.

My single biggest recommendation to Anet not just for this event but for the game overall is to TAKE THE INCREASE IN DC’s SERIOUSLY AND DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

Something has happened in the past two weeks. It needs to be looked into and sorted out because it doesn’t matter how good your content is if you have a client that is unstable, frequently crashing, or regularly DC’ing.

Invasion is still going.

I’m sure everything has already been said, but this event is pretty illogical.

It’s made in low level zones as if to give new players a taste of what the events can be like, but give no exp, karma, or money to help them out as events in the past have. The rewards are all so expensive they can’t buy anything if they do participate.

The event itself encourages tag and run so you can get the 20 stacks necessary for max reward. Because of this the events closes to waypoints get zerged and the ones far away from them are almost ignored.

Also they events themselves are inconsistent in time. The shield blossoms can be destroyed in 40-50 seconds while the catapults will sit there for ages because there aren’t enough people to defend those that man them.

I hope for better in the future. But for this one it’s kind of unrewarding and gets boring quickly.

I see a lot of comments about how bad some of the rewards and lack of XP gain are for new players, but I also want to point out the problem that you need access to three maps with all their waypoints to properly participate in this event.

This event was supposed to be suitable for level 18 characters. However, you can’t expect level 18 characters to have all of those unlocked. Our guild had started new human characters recently to play with a new member, and especially for this event, we made sure to level up to about level 20 and have at least the waypoints in Kessex Hills unlocked – which was already a bit of a stretch considering the time we had available, but we did it. By the time the event started, though, it turned out it the action was only happening in Brisban Wildlands.

So if the intention was to welcome new players with this event, this is another way that it has fallen short.

Getting an honest response is worth more than the 1,800 Blooms I need. Thank you.

Sorry the event did not work/is not working out, sorry people are upset, sorry you have to do damage control.

The remainder of my opinion aligns with the majority.

1. The player is rewarded for killing one mob and moving on. -The player should be rewarded for staying to finish events.

2. The events do not reward Exp., karma, or gold. -The events should reward all of these.

my suggesstion would be just cancel the invasion and put the items for reduced price into the gem shop.

I seriously hope you are going to atleast prolong the event. And you could get rid of the gold pay wall while doing so.

I think it’s unfair to reward people who just ‘tagged’ an event and are going to get bronze/silver just like you reward people who focus on actually finishing an event. It encourages toxic gameplay. People don’t form groups and don’t focus on completion and just run around the map

Drazio.4207:

my suggesstion would be just cancel the invasion and put the items for reduced price into the gem shop.

I would love for them to just throw the items into the cash shop for the next couple days or something. I would be okay if they were at full price too.

I wonder how the devs wanted us to play in this event. Maybe they really intended for us to WP all over the maps, but ofcourse there will be greed. Above all, we wanted this event to succeed, but there’s no apparent penalty for being greedy, aside from mordrem attack sites taking longer to take down. Maybe it’s wiser after all to stay in one site and help finish it, rather than people doing run-tag-run.

Judging by the blossom reward amount, the amount to buy some of the items and the limited time of the event, the devs might have intended for us to buy only one or two of the available items. Although the cost to buy one of the potions is a bit skewed to be honest at first glance. Compared to the Escape from LA/Battle for LA events, it took me about a week of collecting ‘lost belongings’ tokens to buy each of the potions. It’s really that hard to get it. Maybe that’s what they wanted to reflect on the price of the potion.

This event is a good marketing move by anet, obviously targeted at our new F2P co-players. But this is also an opportunity to show people how they handle problems, there maybe some kitten ups, but their way of handling this can make an impression as well about the game and the devs as well. It’s not grace under pressure, it should be awesome under pressure.

I’d like to see rewards increased, DC issues addressed somehow, and the event extended until the end of the month.

Atheismo.5164:

What you just described sounds very fun, and I would definitely play an event like that all day without getting bored.

Thanks, want to know the ironic thing about this?
My idea came from a brainstorm I had which was the following:
“ANet really did well with Crown Pavilion and Guild Bounties. I wonder how they could merge those two things with the Mordrem invasion of three maps?”

It jars my mind that ANet can make potentially fun events, but then not use those same ones as a spiritual template for ground breaking moments or teases like this one.

How am I supposed to get compensated for the times I was DCed???

I wasted hours trying to do this event, just to get DCed at the end and lose everything

Constructive Feedback – I qqed in other treads ; )

- The quality of the encounters themselves (meaning the fights) ain’t that interesting, but it’s not that bad either for a limited time event.

- There is no progression like with Silverwaste, Marionette, Scarlet Invasion and plenty of other example. There is no change in pace or kind throughout the event, no climatic battle at the end. This is one of the main reason most people find it boring. It’s just the same 3-4 types of events randomly distributed around the map.

- There is no sense of victory. Link to my previous point. You can’t win or lose the meta event. You do the more events as possible to get as much reward as possible. You can’t lose an individual event and there is no way to lose at the meta event, which is pretty non existent. How players are suppose to care about this if there is no sense of victory? In the end it’s just a grind that feel like a grind.

- There is no exit point. Either you do the full 30min or you have nothing. Of course the reward to participate from start to end should be superior, but this even is clearly suppose to be a casual one and it should allow you to gain part of the rewards along the way so that someone that need to go AFK for IRL reason don’t get nothing.

- The Stack system is a very poor system that push people to leech the event instead of working together. Leecher and AFK people will always exist, but there is a problem when your reward system incentive people to leech.

- Rewards is lacking. I won’t get over that one again because plenty of people made that clear. The fact that individual event don’t give us reward like xp, karma, etc and the fact that except for daily map, the number of blooms is really low.

The only real issue I had with the event was getting it confused with all of the other events going around at the same time. It felt awkward that this event would spawn on top of other events that were going on at the same time – I didn’t realize the mordrem event circles were red instead of orange and kept getting them mixed up and doing things instead that weren’t part of the actual mordrem event. It took whispering an anet dev who happened to be at the same event as I was and him explaining the color difference before I figured out what I was doing wrong.

Then again, I am apparently a horribly oblivious person when it comes to things like that.

Invictus.1503:

- At least give experience for the kills and/or events. I mean, does it really hurt anything for occasional events like this to provide a faster way for people to level toons? If they happened every day, sure, but at an occasional interval it won’t hurt and goes a long way.

*says in sarcastic tone* Nooo, they want players to level up when they "think" players should be able to do so... *glances at NPE features* You aren’t "supposed" to level up when they "think" it’s not the time for it... :P

Fernling.1729:

Drazio.4207:

my suggesstion would be just cancel the invasion and put the items for reduced price into the gem shop.

I would love for them to just throw the items into the cash shop for the next couple days or something. I would be okay if they were at full price too.

Yeah thats still better than that almost unrewarding event.

i have 95 blossoms but i need 450 for the Toxic set so its for me almost impossible to get that cause like many other i have to work.

@ Gaile Gray

10th

4 chests from 4 map events

• 2 I did get

11th

3 chests from events that didnt happen
3 chests i did get

you mentioned via the coming days via mail

how in heavens name are you gonna have enough staff to check 0.5 – 1 million players logs if the issue is this widespread :S

This event was aimed at new players, but it completely failed at that goal. No EXP, no karma, no coin, no drops, no prizes of any sort until the 30 minute long event ends… It is terrible design.

It feels like this event was handed over to interns with no context. The quality of the events, the distribution of rewards, the cost of prizes, the considerations for newcomers; it all feels like some slapdash afterthought.

My Feedback:

ISSUES:

Waypoint Race Became Frustrating
The biggest challenge with this event has been getting to the events before they end – searching the map for the barely visible markers, finding the nearest uncontested waypoint and then running at top speed hoping the event will still be there when I arrive.

Boring Encounters
The enemies we encounter in this event are the exact same as those we encounter in Silverwastes. I found myself wondering – why not just go to Silverwastes instead.

Repetitive Encounters
Even if you spiced up the enemy diversity, the same three encounters over and over with no variation whatsoever is just boring.

Bugs with scaling and loot
Self explanatory

Timing with Blog Post Felt Like a Bait and Switch
The same day you start this event, you make a blog post about the Mordrem Guard and how cool they are in game. Needless to say, many of us expected them to make an appearance.

POSSIBLE FIXES (for next time)

Fixed Locations
All three maps used for this event incorporate some fixed structures and areas that would seem like logical targets for Mordrem invasions – Fort Salma, the Inquest Lab, Fort Vandal, Nagling, Butcher’s Block, Incendio Templum, North Nolan Hatchery. Give the invasion some consistency and encourage players to spread out between fixed locations – continual 30 minute long attacks at 4-5 locations instead of 2 minute long attacks at 15-20 random spawn spots.

Use new enemies
Why are the Mordrem sending their B team when they have access to Mordrem Snipers, Hive Fiends, Overseers, etc. This would have been the perfect time to drum up some excitement about your new enemies among new players and those on the fence about the expansion. Instead, you sent the mobs many of us have seen a hundred times already.

Break the Monotony with a Big Finish at each Location
Weve faced X number of waves attacking the Five points in Diessa in the past 20 minutes, so in the last 10, Mordremoth is sending a Wyvern (or some other cool newer boss) to attack the northern entrance to the Black Citadel. Again – drum up some excitement for the enemies and make the event a little more interesting.

Bug Fixes
Not sure what to say here. After three years, you still put out events that are buggy and feel untested (even though Im sure they were tested). It’s time for your QA team to come up with a different plan of attack before releases.

FINAL NOTE
I realize that most of your resources are working on the expansion right now and that this event was just a little “gift” to tide us over, but the recommendations I’ve made above could be done with little new creative thought – using existing models (albeit from HOT in some cases) and the model you used to use with Season One.

I love the game and the development team, but what you delivered was not worthy of the Arenanet or Guild Wars 2 name. With all respect, it was substandard, boring and should have been so much more.

Let’s see…

• Give a bit of lore or introduction to this other than a mail. For example, you have to visit your order’s headquarters and talk with a pact liason who gives you a stack of 25 blooms for talking with them for the first time with any character of the account. They give you the blooms as a sample to show you what the pact [remnant] researchers want you to find for their research. People has lost touch with their orders. Give reasons to go visit the base once in a while. Not just for events like these. Each order could have a vendor that each week offers a limited stock of group support items like the limited stock from the Canthan new Year vendors. You could once a week buy something like a a tray of food for a neat karma + coin cost to pop at your guild events.
• It’s not like everyone should be able to get everything in the vendor, but getting at least one or two of the skins or one of the potions should be possible even if you can only play one hour a day.
• Maybe It could be better if all events could go happen within 1 hour. Making each shorter. Something like 15 min, pause of 5 min, another 15 min, another pause of 5, then another 15 min. Then repeat every 2 hours. That’ll give people more chances to do them all, even if they can only have a window of 2 hours to play.
• Something should have discouraged leaving events. For example, each vine could give an effect that is only removed by being near the same vine when it dies or after 2 min, what happens first. If you get too many stacks of that effect because you jump from vine to vine without ever being on the event when it finishes, and get 3 stacks of that effect, the stack of 3 is replaced by a second 2-min penalty effect that prevents earning more stacks, with a warning in the effect’s description telling you that if you keep jumping events like that you won’t earn more stacks, so stick to one event, in a lore way like : “Spore overdose: Being near too many different vines before destroying them is dangerous and we can’t condone that risky behavior, try to finish them off one by one!” or something..
• Needless to say at this point, the stacks should not go away from a character if it didn’t leave the map, even if they disconnect or switch copies of the map.

• I mostly like when events do not have drops on enemies spawned by the event. Some people may disagree, but wit drops, people may focus too much on kills instead event objectives. But that doesn’t mean there should not be drops at all. Don’t give drops on the enemies, but give something after each event. It doesn’t have to be karma, gold or anything expensive, just something good enough so each event doesn’t feel so empty on their own.
• I’d recommend giving the meta-event tiers, and give more blooms per event based on the tier, like how geodes are given per tier in Dry Top. Each event starts with one bloom, get to tier 5, each event gives 5 blooms. Splitting would be easier if there was either more shapes or more colors for commander badges, so we can have more squads. At least 8 or 12 would be nice. They could be the same 4 colors with 2-3 different shapes.
• If there was tiers, the final reward would be given to all based on the total tier of the map for those who got at least 5 stacks. We all work together, we win together.
• Participation calculation is unreliable and there’s many things that do not count (supporting allies, repairing catapults, controlling enemies without doing as many damage as higher damage builds yet still preventing them from touching the guys at the catapults…), if it wasn’t for that I would have given 1,2 or 5 blooms based on participation per event at the end of the event, but only for those who where within the event when finished. Without a better participation calculation, rewards per event can’t be given properly based on participation level, so it’ll have to be the same for all.

• I really, really like how the event included skins that were previously gemstore only. I think that could really work for the future. A ‘life cycle’ for things that start as gemstore exclusives. They start gemstore only and stay like that for years. And as new things are introduced, some skins return to gemstore every now and then and for sales, others become available as rare drops from content of a similar theme (e.g.: aetherized from aetherblades) or limited special event rewards (e.g.: One Wintersday skin per year) that may also tempt people into getting the rest of the set after they get the one for free. Oh, and remember the bunny ears? They could return on an easter weekend event in some way.

The event just isnt really worth it to be honest. Did one round and found better things to do.

It’s frustrating to be part of a large group, only to have 75% of that group (following a commander) suddenly take off, leaving the last 10 or so players in the red circled area to finish up the last 25-50%. This results in multiple deaths, and in last night’s case, at least 5 silver to teleport back to the nearest waypoint, run back down, to help the remaining players try to finish it up.

The money isn’t an issue for me, but if a new player is there for the first time and only has 20 silver to their name? It’s a huge dent.

This happened last night, and because the majority of the group took off after getting in a handful of kills, the 1/2 hour timer ended, that individual event failed, wasting game money and time (really could’ve run off to do another 2-3 events in the time it took to try to clean up that last one.). Multiple wipes to full death for those that stuck it out to try to finish it up.

Either players ONLY get credit for being there until the end of each mini event within the 1/2 hour to discourage roamers, or the mini event needs to scale down as people wander off to try to tag as many as they can to get the most out of their bloom rewards.

People leave, the next time the vine throws mordrem at the 3 catapults… there could be less since it scaled back down again.

A quick fix would be to lower the amount of blooms the Merchant is asking for specific items.
Example: Selfless Tonic cost 450 Blooms – Change it to 360.

Why 360? – because that requires a player to do all 3 maps daily for the next 4 days.
Essentially that means reasonably a player does 11 events per map per day. = 10 Blooms
Daily reward = 20 per map

(11 events + Daily) x 3 maps x 4 days= (10 blooms + 20 Blooms) x 3 × 4 = 360.

That should be considered enough grind for the best or most expensive reward coming from the vendor.
Using the above logic, you can determine the cost of other items on the merchant.
Once you have the values, updating a table that merchant is reading its data from should not take very long.

I did this event a few times now…

Forgetting the event was bugged when released I want to comment:

• Rewards are abysmal:
  - In the end you could buy skins IF you have the gold
  - Nothing for vets? I would really have liked the halloween backpack from 2012…it’s one of the (less then half dozen) items I missed…
• Playing together Apart
  - If you steal use of cata’s snatch explosives from people who try to figure out what to do and so on you’ll get up to 18-20+ quite easily, This doesn’t allow for fair play, I’ve killed a lot of husks, only to see somone drop dead in front of me and my interact resses him and ppl wait and leave me with nothing to get a hit with, this to a point where I actually missed credit for 1 or 2 vines,
  - Also individuals and even groups on tag show up upscale the boss wait until they have a tag and run off collectively leaving you to die in the upscaled event…

So regarding loot:

1. Make stuff cheaper, doing the events should warrant a reward. If you cater this to new player you should also consider many do not have 10 gold. Second asking money as a vendor after I saved the area you’re in is an unwise thing, I’d wait to see the vendor eaten and tell his replacement why.
2. Make drops more rewarding and the dailies less relevant, I ’d prefered 10 per unique map and 2 per Thingy killed this will reward play after the 1st time you did play the event in a specific map and/or when you cannot play 3 hours in a row… making replayability better…
3. make drops appear on the individual events if you kill 5 trees get 5 (preferably 10 see 1 above) but all in individual drops If you kill 18 you get more not 10 and 15 at 20… stepped scaling is horrid.
4. make the event PAY OUT on the moment the small events are finished, and only to people in RANGE of the event, so people do not tag and skip. Latecomers will get their pay, People who want fast tags get -NOTHING-.
5. DO reward Upscaled Bosses, but reward ONLY 1 bloom if the event spawned any champions. With 10 champ bosses still 1 bloom in total, so people will not stack 75 on 1 tag. it will mena a decent group tries to do an event
6. On end of the event there could have been a small reward based on the collective kills, say a bonus on event of
   1 bloom for every 5 events actually completed (on a full map) or
   1 for every 4 completed on a 75% full map or
   1 for every 3 completed on a 50% full map
   1 for every 2 completed on a 25% full map
   when the timer hits 0:00; provided of course you actively participated (e.g. 10% of the total events?) (to prevent afk farming)

And please think about the people you were writing this for: Starters, they have a couple of gold if they are lucky, if they have the blooms, the vendors wil be up for some time now and therefore they can farm the gold afterwards… but it should be affordable in the first place… not an afterthought.

We as players should get money/rewards as we are the hired help… the vendors should be summarily executed for making money of the people trying to save the world, maybe we should feed them to the mordrem. Feet first.

in the future I want the players on the map to be more spread out, so that I can actually feel like I am contributing to what is going on. right now it’s more of a “I hope I can tag that before it dies.”
I want to be rewarded on the spot, so that I don’t get so angry whenever I dc, or don’t have time to finish.
I want account bonuses to make a difference, so I don’t feel like I have all this magic find, gold find, karma gain, exp gain, and yet not any of it is helping. I want straight up loot, not guaranteed champ bags that are not effected by magic find (maybe have different rarities of champ bags?)
I do like the things you can buy with the blooms, good job on the merchant items.

I would suggest that in the future you simply have a formulae for closing x number of events to spawn some sort of major event or boss, which when defeated will drop reward chests.

Each stage of the event drops rewards, so players cannot AFK through it.

Biggest problem, above the lack of rewards, is definately the type of gameplay it encourages: Selfish play, where you just rush from event to event, without actually helping.

Far as i see, there’s a pretty simple solution, design wise at least: Make the final payout depend on the amount of events completed by the entire map (You already keep track of this info right on screen!). If needed, to prevent leechers, you can make it so the Defender buff goes up to 5 or whatever, with each stack giving you a percentage of the final reward (So if 5 stacks max, 0 stacks would give you 0% of the map reward, 1 20% and so on, with 5 stacks giving 100%).
This encourages people to split up, do the events, and generally help each other, the things that make this game so amazing.

Also, the events should really be giving the normal karma/xp/money rewards, if nothing else then for new players. This might lead to some people doing the run-and-tag in order to get more karma and whatever, but it will be a tiny problem compared to currently.

It’s really not easy to give a thorough response about the way this event ended up happening. I really love just this regular update you guys did. Some sort of prelude to HoT, really, really love it.
But the event itself is not working for a few reasons, and that has got everything to do with, how can it be different, loot.
Right now the only rewards you get are the ones you get after playing the whole event cycle, and that only is adding to the small stock you have to actually buy something nice from the vendor. For example, I’ve had quite a lot of time to play today, but only got 80 of those thingies, and I can’t afford spending this much time over the next few days to get to the 450 i need for the thing I want.
I can imagine you did this so you won’t make it easy, but really… There is no random reward, anywhere, no matter what you do, no random blues, greens, spikes or whatever. I think those bonus rewards could make a difference.
So I think the balance in rewards should be taken more into consideration, it really ads up. And as for the events like this, just keep them going, just a bit more balanced