I had lost faith in the ability of MMOs to turn an event into a laggy crapfest where the server blows up and denies everyone the prizes. Congratulations guys, you really one-upped the worst event in WoW history with the single most breathtaking example of game design and server incompetence that I have ever personally witnessed. In fairness, Everquest’s Sleeper event may still hold the overall crown, but I wasn’t online for that one when it happened.
But this, this is a masterpiece. From the horrible core concept of one-time events that occur in the middle of a workday for most of the playerbase, to the servers grinding to a smoking halt in the bigger fights, to the piece de resistance of shutting down the game for a patch when the group I was in had the boss in the final stage and were literally seconds away from downing him after hours of laggy hell, there was not one facet of this experience that was not perfectly crafted to troll your customers. The fact that players had to collaborate outside of the game to even make it into instances where they could attempt to play through the event, only to then have the event crash on them and make them start again from square one, really brings me back to the golden days of MMORPGs. That rare sensation of having a game designer’s genitals pressed against my cheek while their hips gyrate and I sob quietly is not something I’ve experienced from any other online game in recent memory. Even SWTOR managed somehow to not be made of that much disappointment, and it was made by EA! My hat is off to you, sirs.
Now you just need to cap it off by having an ingame announcement from the developers in a PvP zone and forget to turn on the invulnerable flag for the head designer. At that point, GW2 will have cemented its place in online gaming history forever.