Guild Wars 2

So. We’re now 3 days down in the Mordrem invasion event, and complaints definitely racked in.

While it was clearly meant for a fun event to both introduce new players to world-wide event and a way to make older players have access to rewards they might’ve missed last season, there’s a load of little things that instead just pulled new players away and turned it into a grind for the rest.

So, what went wrong?

· Players feel under-rewarded/Rewards are too low: No karma/experience gained per complete event, low amount of tokens awarded compared to the given effort (30 minutes of active* play), waypointing costs usually get up to a ~30 silver loss per blitz.
· The events feel boring/The events encourage tag-and-run: To get the maximum amount of bloom, cooperation isn’t encouraged as much as sticking around long enough to secure credit, then run off. Players who do the whole event end up sacrificing their own personal rewards and end up bitter.
(*Active, meaning hands on keyboard and no breaks or time for a breather, whisper a friend about how you’re doing the event and that they need to stop whispering you, use the little warrior’s room, get your cat off the desk, etc etc.)

There’s probably more to that list, but you can simmer it down to a few core points:
The only way to get “good” rewards is to disregard group completion and instead tag-and-run, and even when doing that, people feel under-rewarded.

There’s a great deal of ways of dealing with all of those problems, and I trust ANet to do as they’ve done before: Take what’s good of a flawed event, and build up from those pieces.

Now, here’s a little list of ways to improve this event, both my ideas and some gathered from players:

· Have the events give experience/karma: Without those, new players have barely any reason to participate apart from simply stumbling on one of the active maps. It would also give ‘veterans’ another reward. Perhaps to restrain turning it into a karma farm, have the rewards cut in half. Something is better than nothing.
· Give the event mobs a chance to drop blooms: One of the biggest complaints I see on almost every map is how getting enough blooms is hard and unfun due to spending a Lot of time running, tagging, rince and repeat over 1:30/3 hours. Giving the event mobs a chance to drop blooms would ease that, and let people reach their goals more easily
· Extend the time limit for the event itself OR lower the 20 bloom gold rank: What I’ve seen in a lot of maps is people playing for the whole duration of the event, reaching about 16-17 stacks as the event ends, and feeling like they’ve pushed some effort for nothing. Giving more time or making the top reward more accessible would allow players to actually do events properly, without having the stress of having to waypoint-run-tag-waypoint.

If need be, let’s look at two other “farm” events that exist in the game: the Cursed Shores event chains, and the Silverwastes. People run, tag, but there’s an incentive to finish events for rewards, and people definitely feel rewarded for doing them.

I’d personally love to see this event come back as the expansion comes, to ease traffic on the new maps or simply to give people another chance. At its core, it’s definitely not a bad event. Perhaps having a few days per month during the expansion where Mordrem invade around and let people try to go for those old rewards.

Do feel free to reply with ideas and ways to make this event better! This is a long post, but if you’ve things to add, please do.