Rewards were fine, if a bit pricey for the amount of blooms you could reasonably get in a day plus what new player has enough gold for those waypoint costs? Other people have done the math regarding how many blooms you can get in a day from the daily reward + doing one full cycle per day with 20 stacks. I believe it was 420, meaning if you wanted one of the potions you’d have to do two more 20-stack zone invasions on top of the dailies. That’s all if you play as selfishly and greedily as possible by tagging an event and waypointing ASAP. I personally found that method of play to be difficult to maintain and quite enraging as getting anything less than 20 stacks means not only do you have to sacrifice even more time to this event, the time you’ve already spent was slightly wasted. Yes, slightly wasted because the design of this event is pull-out-all-the-stops and focus on your own rewards, don’t worry about anyone else, don’t res anyone because if you take one moment for anything other than MAX TAG AND PORT then you are giving up your rewards.
Anyways, about the design. There should have been less stacks to get and more incentive to stay in an area instead of waypointing around like crazy. Like you get a bonus bloom if you get silver or 2 blooms for gold.
The lack of a meta for the event. Should be that at 25 and 50 events completed a champion spawns and drops 5 blooms and a champ bag or something like that. Or maybe just one champ at 60. That alone would have made more people worry about completing events since all the tagging and porting rarely finished more than 40 events.
Don’t get me started about the no experience/karma/2bluesandagreen… THAT decision made this whole thing feel like purgatory. I’m serious when I say that if no other change would have been made than to allow experience/karma gain and basic loot drops then I wouldn’t feel nearly so negative.
EDIT I forgot to mention that the forced breaks were a bad call. If you really had to have a break it should have been more like 3 × 40/20 and a 60 minute break instead of 3 × 30/30 + 90. All that waiting killed it. Not enough time to do much other than sit on your thumb flipping stuff on the trading post, let alone trying to log off and do a chore or something. And the 90 minute break? For real? If I have a limited amount of time to play and I’m super jazzed to try out the first bit of actual content in months but I log on slightly too late because traffic/had to stay a bit later at work/REASONS and I miss the Brisban invasion, my minimum playtime is now increased 90 minutes and for someone who might not have the time, 90 minutes is just silly. I cannot fathom the reasoning behind having the break in the first place. Look, the Dry Top method is the best imo. 40/20 with no break at all and you’re good to go. In and out in around 3 hours no matter when you log on.
EDIT 2 I almost forgot about people that might only be able to play on a Tuesday or a Wednesday. I guess this event wasn’t for them? I guess you might have been planning on extending the event a day or 3…
EDIT 2.1 Also please stop with the “Hey guys, we’re EXTENDING THE EVENT! Aren’t you super excited now?!?!” Just say what the actual event start and end dates are. It’s an obvious psychological ploy, just like what you did with the commander tag colors. You never intended to go live charging for individual colors, you just wanted to rile everyone up to garner some attention and incentivize more ppl to get tags at the cheaper price.
EDIT 3 Another thing: If you are wanting to make more former gem store skins available through in-game content and this is the general form said content might take, please keep the skins on the gem store since paying real money for them is a better use of my time.
TL/DR Read it.
(edited by Jasherm.4291)