Not to devalue what OP is saying, but what exactly do you expect Anet to do about this? You can’t expect all their content to be “easy” for everyone – that’s unrealistic.
Easy, not necessarily. Available through several different avenues? Definitely. Which is besides the fact that this is a holiday content. A Wintersday holiday content. As such it most certainly should be easily available to everyone.
It’s really sad that the original idea of Wintersday got so corrupted, that nowadays it means only “let’s fleece all those naive kittens”.
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
Similar position here. I have a character that the skin would look great on, but don’t have the gold to buy 10,000 drinks. Farming them is well outside any reasonable definition of gameplay, as is farming the gold to buy them. Did ArenaNet really want this skin to only be available to two “elite” groups of players: The Trading Post Warriors, and the Pavlov Pack. I just find flipping items on the TP, and spending hours doing exactly the same thing over and over, dull. Compare acquiring this skin to acquiring Mini Liadri the Concealing Dark, and tell me which one is better.
Here’s my suggestion for what it’s worth: Keep the drinking achievement and it’s title. Add a different reward maybe? An Endless Barrel of Eggnog? And change the last item of the collection to something else, like 1,000 drinks, or giving 100 wrapped presents to Orphans.
Maybe I’m just biased though. I just want the skin, but I’d be happy with any reasonable method of acquiring the skin.
However gw and gw2 has always been about sideways progression. Meaning its easy to get exotics in several ways, but if you want certain skins you have to work for it. This is where the grind/no grind confusion debate comes in. There’s nothing wrong with anet making something hard to get, or costly.
As a GW1 player, I’m sure you’re familiar with the fact that holiday events were a chance for players to earn something new without having to get into the heavy time/money sinks that other ingame prestige rewards called for. You’re right, there isn’t anything wrong with something being difficult to get and there are MANY items ingame that fit that criteria even if we just look at recent stuff; the new legendary weapons, legendary PvP backpack, Nightfury, Scribing, the new high end forge recipes, the legendary armor whenever it gets added, ect.
Meanwhile, there’s little to nothing that gets added for the casual players. Holidays like Wintersday use to be a good time to add something new that the entire playerbase could reasonably expect to earn, but now it’s being used to add yet another huge gold sink to a game already full of them.
The flip side of what you said is that there also shouldn’t be something wrong with new stuff being easy to acquire, yet how often does that actually happen compared to new content being a large time/gold sink? I think people are really overestimating how often new cosmetics are actually casual player friendly; outside of the launch of vanilla and HoT there really isn’t much that comes to mind.
As a GW1 player, I’m sure you’re familiar with the fact that holiday events were a chance for players to earn something new without having to get into the heavy time/money sinks that other ingame prestige rewards called for.
The massive amount of time and uncounted platinum spent working on the lucky and unlucky tracks in GW1 during holidays qualify as heavy time/money investments IMO.
As a GW1 player, I’m sure you’re familiar with the fact that holiday events were a chance for players to earn something new without having to get into the heavy time/money sinks that other ingame prestige rewards called for.
The massive amount of time and uncounted platinum spent working on the lucky and unlucky tracks in GW1 during holidays qualify as heavy time/money investments IMO.
I guess I should have made it more clear that I was talking about cosmetic rewards. Title tracks were a huge grind, but they were never required to actually get the minis or costumes that came with holiday events.
As a GW1 player, I’m sure you’re familiar with the fact that holiday events were a chance for players to earn something new without having to get into the heavy time/money sinks that other ingame prestige rewards called for.
The massive amount of time and uncounted platinum spent working on the lucky and unlucky tracks in GW1 during holidays qualify as heavy time/money investments IMO.
I guess I should have made it more clear that I was talking about cosmetic rewards. Title tracks were a huge grind, but they were never required to actually get the minis or costumes that came with holiday events.
Ahh, see the titles could be more of a reward than any costume or mini to me. This was especially true of titles that increased other rewards.
