Guild Wars 2

Phase 1.
I like listening to the NPCs on a regular day. The Asura and Human arguing over whether or not to close the port was the kind of thing I enjoy.
I was unable to fully participate in the battles and NPC chains due to bugs. I ended up having taken four hours off work to kill six karka and talk to three NPCs.
Getting letters was helpful. I was happy for it (though I didn’t get spammed).

Phase 2.
Skipped it entirely because of how Phase 1 went.

Phase 3.
Similar bugginess to what was happening in Phase 1 kept me from enjoying the bulk of Phase 3. I qualified for maybe 20 kills. I mainly did a crazy amount of reviving. Every time I threw down a warbanner I would earn 5k xp instantly.

The phases for things like opening geysers and making rocks fall were cool.

My overflow zerg finished the boss before the mainserver one did. I mentioned to a buddy there that the loot was going to be epic, he asked for links, and I showed my pile of exotics. I mentioned that one was a precursor worth 40g. I was expecting he’d get similar. He didn’t. And now I feel kinda guilty about having inadvertently rubbed his nose in it. I’m the one who just started playing after release. He’s the GW1 fanboy who was in on headstart.

TL;DR – My Votes
Do make more NPC stuff to listen to.
Do make more environment interaction along the event path.
Don’t make events merciliessly time sensitive.
Don’t make events that encourage high player density.
Don’t make the widest possible gap in potential rewards.

Even with how today’s event went, I feel ArenaNet is the most capable triple-A developer running right now. I’m still going to buy the expansion if/when there is one. I’m still going to sprint between undiscovered points of interest and sit around to listen to idle NPC chatter in the evenings. However, for one-time events specifically, this killed my interest for participating in others ones in the future.

I expect there’s a few people in ArenaNet who can already give the exact same notes I’m about to give (and they can probably do it better with citations), or you may even have data that directly contradicts me. I don’t know, but I wanna throw it out there in case they’re busy with other things and aren’t available, or the data doesn’t contradict me and no one has had time to check.

I have a feeling a lot of the bugs people are encountering en-masse today are unavoidable. Probably technology simply hasn’t advanced far enough to handle the level of stress we all provide. Some kind of limit of hardware physics. All I was seeing was what other players were doing. For my way of playing, “what other players are doing” is the least important piece of information I need. I primarily want to know what the enemy is doing to me, and then I want to be able to do things back to the enemy. A combo field is a nice bonus, but the bonus is moot if I have no enemies onscreen to affect with it. If there are processing priorities, please shift them around.

But anyways, more specifically, I question the business value of one-time events to begin with. Save yourselves some development overhead and just don’t enter those waters. I took time off work to be in for the opening salvos. But this was strongly disappointing. It was not worth it. Judging by the other threads there’s a decent vocal minority in the same boat.

If the extent, bulk, or even core of an event is outside anyone’s usable play time, you’re reducing your potential market for premium/secondary upsells. The key hook should ideally be able to be leveraged against any potential consumer. Unknown one-time events are very “come-as-you-are” since there’s no information to use for optimizing your character. If there was events others had done, and they had passed on knowledge I can use, that will drive me to make to BLTC transactions to smooth my run.

Me, as an individual customer, if I were to tailor my experience, I would want no oops-you-missed-it or oops-it-didn’t-work events and only events that I can savour by retrying them and getting good at them. I feel like that’s what will keep me interested and returning consistently enough that I would be playing often enough to rationalize things like gem purchases to myself.