Now that Season 1 is over, here’s my list of general comments/criticisms and suggestions so that Season 2 will be even better. Overall, I enjoyed the extra focus on WvW.
Rewards – no complaints at all from me here. Just about right as far as I can tell.
Achievements – some categories need refinement. I had no trouble completing all of them, but I have a bit more free time than the average player right now. The focus should be on better teamwork, and the categories that award specific individualized credit instead of to groups need to be scrapped or redone.
- Captures of Stonemist, Keeps, Towers, Supply Camps, Ruins – just about right
- Guard kills, World rank – just fine
- Sentry capture, Dolyak kills – should be a category, but a bit too many required. I’m thinking 150 or so each would be more appropriate.
- Mercenary camps – far too many required since they are only available in EB.
- Jump Puzzles, Big Spender – no objection to these, but no strong feelings either way
- Player kills – too easy, at least for me – was done a day or two into the season. Since I’m on a high populated server with active WvW, that might be coloring the opinion, I don’t have any experience on less populated servers (been on SBI since launch).
- Demolition expert – while destroying walls and gates are very important, the way credit for this was given encouraged selfishness over teamwork. People without mastery would grab rams or catapults and slow their teams down. I have no objection to the category, but the threshold for getting credit should be reworked.
- Repairs supplied – scrap this one entirely. Again, it encourages selfish play instead of teamwork, and caused much pointless bickering and wasted supply.
- Missing categories – should have defense of objectives as additions next season.
Schedule – You tried hard for fair schedules, but there really weren’t many fair fights or surprising results. A few suggestions:
- Less time between announcement of the Season and commencement of it. Normally I’m all for knowing whats to come as long in advance as possible, but the extended time caused some rankings manipulation prior to the start that might not otherwise have occurred.
- The last week matchup could be used as a championship match or tiebreak instead of a fixed matchup known from the beginning.
Living Story in WvW – I don’t know how to phrase this anymore politely, but this was a horrendously bad idea. Putting the toxic events on top of the mercenary camps should never have occurred. The ones on the borderlands in the skritt and centaur camps, while not ideal, no one much cared about because those areas are not strategically important to the flow of the map.
Trial accounts during the season – having trial accounts during a competition that could be used as throwaways for sabotaging you opponent is another of those things that should never have happened.
Better monitoring of exploits and intentional sabotage needs to be a top priority for Season 2. Can you imagine what would happen if there were no referees during sporting matches and there were seemingly no consequences to breaking the rules? Please dedicate more resources for around the clock coverage and monitoring. Please increase response time to reports of people intentionally wasting supply, running golems off cliffs, etc.
Looking forward to Season 2 whenever it comes around!