Guild Wars 2

So from playing and reading the forums etc almost everybody – a/-wont get the JP done; b/-wont get enough mats to make anything nice. Then looking at Dulfy’s there doesn’t seem to be much of a reward for getting the meta-achievement done.

No doubt I’m missing something, but what do us – the masses – expect to get from all of this (I’m having fun with it, just wondering what, if any, goals there are to aspire to) – and by ‘the masses’ I don’t mean those people out there that play 18hrs a day and throw bucket fulls of real money into the game.

A mini candy golem.

Zanshin.5379:

A mini candy golem.

And a Candy corn node. If you do the story thing-a-ma-jig.

I like both prizes, and there’s a special Mask reward for playing Mad King Says at the end of the month, but I have to admit that the payoff for completing the meta turned out to be a bit underwhelming. The final instance was really entertaining, I thought…for the five minutes it lasted. Even less when I did it with a party for the <1min achievement.

I’m hoping there’s going to be more to the Bloody Prince before Halloween. He, Thorn, and Tassi are all interesting characters, so it’s a shame that the “war between the Mad King and the Bloody Prince” should be decided so abruptly. I mean, you could spend substantially more time reading the Blood & Madness release page than you spend in the instance with the Prince himself.

Fun? I’ve been having fun doing story stuff, labyrinth, and door events.

tl;dr
If it were the same duration as last year, with roughly the same rewards, that would be about what was expected for returning holiday events. What really confuses people is how much content have been removed, and how much is being offered in such a way that most players simply don’t have the gold necessary for it. Less content, but in a longer window, promising unobtainable long-term rewards, with no hint of any follow-up.

It’s confusing because it seems like it could be improved just by leaving in last year’s content and reducing Sonder the Seller’s numbers. Whether or not it would truly be that simple, I leave to game designers, but it has that appearance, and appearance matters in public perception.
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The OP said he’s having fun; I think he’s just confused because half the big rewards (new weapon skins, old weapon recipes, mini Prince, Halloween pail;) are totally out of the reach of most players. I think everyone is fairly well perplexed at that.

I mean, it’s no surprise that the new BLC weapons are expensive; we’re used to that by now. But the new way of obtaining recipes for The Crossing & Friends is so overpriced that they might as well remained discontinued, since it’s cheaper (but still super expensive) to flat out buy them, or hire someone else to craft it for you, and even the Candy Corn Cob items are unrealistically priced for anyone to earn by playing the content.

If it were just the old rewards, we’d get it; we knew festivals were going to get largely recycled. In this case, though, we’re presented with a bunch of long-term goals (Mostly with Sonder the Seller) that are apparently unobtainable by anyone who hasn’t been hording gold. Then you cut out the titles from last year, the storyline (both the Mad Memoires and the well-advertised multi-arc event structure,) and there’s really no sense that the event has enough long-term goals left for the average player. Much as I enjoy Clocktower, Inquisition, and the Labyrinth, I’m not sure I’m going to enjoy them all the way to November 11th.

Last year’s Halloween didn’t start until the 22nd, and we couldn’t even access the Mad Realm until the 26. All in all, the content was there for about two weeks, while this year’s content seems to be looking at three or more weeks. If you assume that people spend two weeks on this content, then mostly jump on the next release (leaving the Halloween stuff for stragglers, farmers, and Mad King Says,) that closes it back into a two week window. However, there’s less content than last year, since Reaper’s Rumble is gone, and the (short but fun) dungeon is gone. The lengthy Mad Memoires scavenger hunt is replaced by maybe ten, fifteen minutes of (very entertaining) new content in the Tassi instances, which are altogether probably not longer than the Mad King Thorn battle last year. It takes a while to get through them because of the meta, but as that’s playing the rest of the content, we’ve already counted it in listing other things to do.

I was hoping there would be more revealed later on, but they’re not teasing it at all (as they did with last year’s arc-based structure,) the second Bloody Prince instance seems to end his story pretty conclusively, and all signs point to the next Living Story release being about the Krait, rather than a continuation of this story. It’s possible there will be more revealed, but any kind of teaser would do wonders for morale around here. A large part of this release shouts “long term goals” but doesn’t really deliver on them.