The Lost Shores themselves were interesting. I liked the DE where you have to avoid buried worms while snagging up golem parts, as it was very different than DEs that usually seem to involve just killing things or bringing an npc items after the battle. It actually reminded me of a Challenge map from GW Factions.
When I saw mention that it was going on throughout the day, I figured it might hopefully still be going after I got off work. So, when I saw people talking about it restarting multiple times in some of the overflow servers as well as about the “rewards” well, I was pretty stoked over the chance to get to do the event, beat the boss, and see it first hand, let alone items like a 20 slot bag, or an unique earring.
I do commend ANet for making the events accessible to players of all levels and not just making it just for level 80 characters, and its one of the few things I felt worked really well for this event.
My main issues with how it seems to have been handled overall are…
1. There are still too many cases of events being bugged where NPCs don’t exist and on events that only last a single day especially, being unable to be fixed during the event, really kills a lot of the incentive to even try to complete the event as well as causes a lot of player frustration due to the content deciding to cease to exist when it should be still available.
2. This is particularly focused on the finale event. When I finally was able to get on, due to having to be at work before that, it took quite a while before I could even enter an overflow server that had the event, and wasn’t full. Shortly after we got to the reinforcement phase, the servers mass disconnected everyone with no warning. Somehow I made it back to an overflow server that was around the same point, and things were going well, until we reached the last group of the reinforcement phase and ran into the “A New Build is Available” message. At that point I was already starting to dread that this was going to be how my time with the event would end. When the Announcement appeared that stated “We’ve updated the game for routine maintenance only. No content changes were included.” appeared, I stuck around for a bit since it wasn’t midnight Pacific time yet, and “No content changes were included.” might mean the event should still be available. Unfortunately that did not seem to be the case, which took all the excitement I got from logging on after work and finding out that the event wasn’t completely over, and turned it into disappointment and frustration.
I can live with the fact that I didn’t get to finish the events, even if its frustrating that I didn’t have the chance to take part in it on a meaningful level. However, when even the basic event rewards are quite nice on top of that, it just makes the frustration worse for those who weren’t able to do it due to server lag, time zones, or just having real life commitments that can’t be dropped for a game event.
I still hold that the combination of how the event “Ended”, which mostly seems to have been a new build patch at a very inopportune time during the Ancient Karka fight in various overflow servers combined with almost complete lack of mod explanations, comments, or even presence on the forums except for the announcement about the “maintenance” perhaps makes it understandable why so many people are upset.
I do think the Community did a wonderful job helping people find overflows that were still doing the event, and continuing to work on beating the Ancient Karkan to help those of us who couldn’t make it earlier be able to at least take it down once. My fellow players, thank you, I only wish we had been allowed to finish what we’d began.
I don’t really even mind the missing the Precursor stuff, it would have been nice to have gotten one, but its not like everyone did. I just wanted to finish, and maybe even get more bag space or the earring to look forwards to as an upgrade once I actually could equip it.
In conclusion, its not the end of the world. I may just start ignoring any one time event that I can’t commit to wholly. Why should I f6rustrate myself trying to play content that seems like it was rushed and that either due to bugged events or schedule limitations (which I can’t help but feel would have been fixed by something like the GW1 events or Mad King Says this year which repeated the finale throughout the day. If strict scheduling is something that the developers know will make a notable group of customers frustrated and upset, why not have a more lenient timeframe to do it in? I’m not sure anyone thought that the finale for this event meant that it was going to be one time per server, especially when it was stated to be available for several hours.) only to have the game cut off in the middle of the event.