Hello all,
Trying to address issues here so perhaps the devs can see each reason why this event has not been taken too well by the community. I’m sure a lot of them know about the kittenstorm on reddit at the moment due to this.
So to start, the event was advertised as a way to connect new and veteran players together. While this sort of works, a lot of the rewards are too expensive (rightly or wrongly) for a ‘new’ player to afford. This, imo, can be considered a good thing. New players should possible be able to afford the less prestigious items, but ones such as the potions should be left as being veteran only, due to how rare they actually are.
Not to mention the apparent drop rate of the blooms, in its current state, you’d have to farm for an unreasonable amount of time to be able to get them. This is also a problem, the event only lasting for 1 weekend locks a lot of players out of loot who possible work both days and only get a few hours in to farm.
This brings me to the next issue: event tagging. The way the buff works at the moment causes people to run to each event they can, tag each one and leave. There is 0 exp, loot or other rewards for getting gold. You can bronze each event and get the maximum possible reward from this event as a whole.
Scaling the events as much as it is at the moment makes me feel like having less people is better. I loved the incentive that GW2 has promoted since launch that you should enjoy seeing other players in the world, but with this world event seems to do the opposite. I’ve missed out on three or four events that have simply died too quickly, from the main plant being around 50% ish and just vanishing, then the leftover mobs being quickly deleted before I get to tag any. (this seems to be the shield plant event only)
Either the shield and catapult events need to take longer or the bomb event needs to be nerfed. Picking up the explosives and throwing them seems to take at least twice as long as the other two in my own experience. Whether this is new players taking the seeds and lobbing them in the wrong direction or poor scaling I don’t know. I make sure to get as many bombs as I can and throw them at the main plant.
No experience. There is little incentive at the moment for new players to do this. This could have been a nice way to give them a level boost. I know when starting an MMO any way to give me a level boost I will gladly take. It’s much more fun to run around with friends in a huge zerg, getting fast levels than it is to do hearts in my personal experience.
The main problems are the poor amount of blooms you receive for the time invested, the advantage you get for tagging an event and selfishly leaving (guilty as charged) and finally the long waiting times between each event. This is all without mentioning the bug on the rewards anyway. I played for about 4 hours straight, stubbornly trying to get blooms. I did not get a single one in the end and have not received them retroactively yet. I’m alright with this as long as the people who missed out on the rewards do receive them before the vendors leave.
Finally, I love how transparent and talkative the devs are about class changes and such. Roy in particular is very talkative on the Revenant forums for example. Could we get an explanation as to why this event was so poorly designed? I’m guessing the main developers are still hard at work to get the October release date on HoT, but that’s besides the point.
Cheers <3
I shall post my results here.