Some of GW2’s best features came from rethinking MMO conventions to promote inclusiveness and cooperative play. For example, automatically sharing credit for monster kills, individual loot drops and individual gathering nodes. These allow everyone to “win”, rather than create some winners and some losers.
This way of thinking was absent from the Ancient Karka event chain. First, it was implemented as a “one-time” event that lasted several hours. I mentioned this already in an earlier thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/lostshores/No-One-Time-Events-We-re-Paying-Customers/first
Second, completing the event rewarded some players with legendary precursors, creating some huge winners. The level of rewards here were completely disproportionate to anything else in the game so far. Whether you finish a World Event chain or run a dungeon, you’d be extremely lucky to get even a single exotic.
Together, these two factors created a lot of losers. If you live in the wrong time zone, you lose. If you were busy that day, you lose. If you quit halfway due to lag and/or frustration, you lose. If you got disconnected and couldn’t get back to a shard with an active event chain, you lose. If you “only” got L78 exotic drops from the the Ancient Karka chest, you lose. That’s a lot of losers. And people don’t want to play GW2 to feel like losers. Everyone wants to feel like a winner.
Rolling back the servers isn’t an option, so what can be done so that more people “win”?
(1) Design future World Events to allow everyone to participate. Some ideas that have come up on the forums include running the events multiple times over a day or week, or implementing some kind of instancing or phasing. At the absolute minimum, one time events should not give out the most valuable items on the TP.
(2) Find other ways to give everyone a much better shot at legendary precursors and make other activities more rewarding. For example, buff the drops from other event chains, such as the Orrian temples, to match the Ancient Karka event. Buff the dungeon rewards further to give at least one rare or exotic per run, or perhaps a bag of Tier 6 crafting materials.
This is just my 2 cents. You can cater to the people who feel like winners only if others lose, or the people who don’t care if other people lose as long as they have a good time. But I’d much rather play a GW2 in which everyone can win.