I love you guys, I really do. And I love your game. But this event wasn’t particularly fun or well-implemented, even though the rewards at the end were great (I didn’t get a precursor or anything, but the 20-slot box alone made it worth it for me). I’m not going to reiterate all of the stuff that went wrong, because I’m sure you’re already aware, but at the risk of sounding like an armchair developer, I have a few suggestions.
1) Don’t make event stuff dependent on actual DEs. DEs break, and the Lost Shores content broke in the same way regular open-world DEs have been breaking since release. It’s taken weeks to fix some of that stuff. The Halloween scavenger hunts didn’t seem to have the same issues, probably because most of them only required talking to an NPC, rather than depending on them triggering an event. People also had several days to do the first phase of the Halloween content.
2) Southsun is gorgeous. Probably the most beautiful zone in the game. It could easily be a farmer’s paradise with some increased loot drops to make it a good replacement for Cursed Shore, since the enemies are much harder and better drops would be completely justified. Right now, the best rewards seem to come from running Fractals, which is great for people who love dungeons and not so awesome for those of us who don’t. I do enjoy the Fractals, but I can’t run them very often. GW2 often reminds me of things I enjoyed about FFXI, but one thing I didn’t enjoy about FFXI—the reason I quit, in fact—was that eventually SquareEnix nerfed every method for farming in the game so that players were only really rewarded by running high-end group content.
3) I think the gem store is being steered in the wrong direction. This update gave us two things to buy, neither of which were particularly interesting. I mentioned this in another thread, but the problem with putting so much emphasis on the gambling chests is that those of us who dislike RNG will just buy the skins they drop from the TP, when we might have purchased them directly if they’d been offered. You could make them unable to be sold, and it’s generous of you to let people resell them, but there is a serious lack of things to buy for those of us who just want to fling money at you and get something in hand. Most of it is the standard gimmicky/silly cash shop stuff like bunny ears and crazy hats, but at least in most games those things can be worn any time. I would love it if you updated the gem store more frequently, with a wider variety of items; what happened to the Scholar set that was in the BWEs, or the first version of the Pirate outfit?
4) There’s been a lot of mystery and lore hinted at surrounding the karka, but the events on the island and the surrounding storyline seem to revolve completely around the, uh, kitten-ups of the Consortium and the efforts of the Lionguard to restrain themselves from throttling them while fighting the crabs. Defeating the Ancient Karka and attacking the hive also doesn’t appear to have had any effect on the karka population of Southsun, despite the stated purpose of the event being “take control of the island from the karka.” The karka still pretty much run the place; it is Karkasville, North Karkland, population: karka, primary export: karka bits, motto: “Please take some karka home to the wife—we had so much this year.” Obviously there still need to be karka there to fight, but the island post-event is exactly the same as the island pre-event, as far as I can tell. Same events, same mob distribution, same giant enemy crabs.
5) I’m not flipping out about Ascended gear, but I really liked the fact that max-stat gear was fairly easily attainable and the rest was customization (both visual and setting up the perfect stats and runes for a given build). I really think you should just leave it at backpieces and rings. You already had sort of a mid-tier between exotic and legendary in the form of very difficult-to-forge exotics like Mjolnir and Foefire’s Power, but the problem is that Ascended gear seems about that hard to get, but has a stat increase. The biggest issue with those items to begin with was that the only way to get them was farming gold, so I think you could have fixed the “tier gap” issue by creating more ways to get interesting skins.
6) I love the Colossus fractal. Beautiful area, fun mechanics, and one of the most touching moments I’ve ever seen in a video game. Way to make players actually feel like big kitten heroes. I cannot give your team enough praise for that final moment.
Thank you for everything, and for listening to our feedback. I know you guys work hard, and I’m looking forward to your future plans regardless. Sorry to hear the previous thread got eaten—this weekend just won’t quit. :P
(edited by Bonefield.9813)