So having been through 2 events now in GW2 I wanted to provide my feedback comparing the two and analyzing what I felt worked or needed improvement. To give some idea of my point of reference, I’m a casual player, I don’t really do dungeons or pvp and am mostly interested in PvE.
Things that worked:
Overall the scavenger hunts have been pretty fun. The reward from the halloween hunt was much better than the reward from the lost shores hunt, though the lost shorts hunt(s) were shorter and had some other issues. I would suggest that things like Noll and Canach use the lovely instancing feature that is featured in personal storylines. I enjoy learning the backstory and discovering new things about the event. I do wish they were a little more possible to do without consulting online guides, though.
Mad King Dungeon was a great boss event. It was challenging without being impossible, and didn’t take forever so it felt fun and I ended up doing it a second time with one of my alts. The 5 person party instance helped it to feel like everyone was contributing to the fight, and avoided any issues with rendering enemies or other players. Additionally, the respawn set up allowed you to effectively use the waypoint. The combination of puzzle and fight was well balanced.
The Labyrinth was also quite fun to run around in, rewards felt right for the effort I was putting in, and it didn’t get dull over the course of the event.
The costume brawl was enjoyable. I especially appreciated how flexible the time commitment was—it was easy to jump in while waiting for a friend to show up, or to brawl for an hour at a stretch.
I also enjoyed the teasers for Lost Shores—the signs around lion’s arch, etc. Very nice touch.
Things that didn’t work so well:
The clocktower puzzle. I don’t really focus on jumping puzzles, so this isn’t really my thing, but I gave up after one attempt and the flood of people blocking my view. I’m not that good at jumping puzzles to begin with, and absolutely horrible at them when someone else is jumping along with me. Between the people and the timed nature of it, I was done at the first pause.
Southsun cove area difficulty vs reward. I’m not sure how much time I spend killing Karka in the area. I did not get many drops that weren’t grey ‘junk’ items. I know for sure I have 5 karka shells, and never saw anything above a green drop from any creature there. I never managed to fill my inventory once. Given the amount of time it took to kill the Karka, this was very disappointing. I don’t think I’ll be going back for a while.
One time events in general. I enjoyed the finale events in GW1 that took place every three hours . I understand there’s a push towards having characters only do these things once in GW2, and I’m fine with that. But I do like to have some flexibility as to when I attend, and to be frank your servers don’t seem up to having the entire population of a server converge on a single location all at once. Spreading out the events but limiting them to once per account would make it easier on both the players and your servers.
On a related note, the finale event yesterday was simply just not fun. It took much too long, most of the time I could not even see the enemies that were attacking due to culling issues, and I did not get credit for tagging enemies that I know I was managing to hit. Prior to the final reward, I would have said that I died to often and repair costs were too high, but the value of the things in the chest covered that pretty nicely. So thanks for that. But in general, please do try to avoid events that take more than say, an hour at a time. And as noted, please allow multiple start times, though I’m happy to be limited to being rewarded for an event a single time. Mostly, the lack of being able to see enemies (or aoe target circle warnings) made the fight seem less a test of skill and more luck of where the enemy popped out from invisibility.
Communication regarding start times and places for limited time events really needs to be clearer. For the event yesterday we had a lively guild discussion as to whether we were supposed to be starting from lion’s arch or southsun, and if southsun cove, then where in the area? Clearly the attack was planned well in advance, those explosives had to come from somewhere. It’s obvious the Lionguard knew where they were starting from, why didn’t we?
Finally, the pacing of the halloween event (new phase every 2-3 days) was much better than that of the Lost Shores event. Lost Shores felt rushed—who rebuilds a city in 2 days, or manages to plan an assault in that amount of time? Logistically it made it difficult to complete the events, especially with the technical issues that cropped up. Allowing 2-3 days per phase would alleviate the pressure both on players and on developers faced with inevitable glitches.
