Why the past two holidays events *worked*

[altarego]

In the past, there have been quite a few complaints that events are "unfair" or favor a particular playstyle, or favor powerful guilds, etc. Folks would camp out waiting for a spawn, hoping to be the top 1-3 hitters, and most would walk away empty-handed.

The past two holiday events have made some minor adjustments that I think scale much better between shards of low/high populations and solo/group playstyles.

I think that there are at least 3 hugely important factors here:

1. Turkeys/moongrass/sparklies are all over the place, there's no one place to camp for a particular spawn.

2. The fact that the top 20 receive at least a map fragment or that every virtue dungeon was filled with sparklies makes it so that just about anyone can run in and help out. And if that particular dungeon of sparklies/turkey is full up, just move on to the next one.

3. The reward portion of the quest is character specific. No one is fighting over reward spots and the reward is *not* directly linked to a single chance event (i.e. death of tybul, harbinger, turkey...)


Point is, make the challenges tougher. Shorten the time limits. Make the spawns more difficult. But make *more* instances of them. And don't tie rewards to random events. But make those random events ultimately lead up to a reward that no one has to fight over and I think you'll have a much happier crowd.

 

[Farsight]

Good points, all of them.

 

[Potgut]

I agree. Though one thing I liked about the Halloween event is that it wasn't so much that it was hard as it was time consuming if you were shooting for a luck garb, this is a great system for people at any skill level to participate and still have a chance for a big reward while the cost (time) to get the luck garb still kept this item unique and rare. The Halloween event wasn't as skill intensive.

On the other hand killing turkeys is much more skill intensive, otherwise your going to really have to rely to work with a group of people (which makes it more fun than trying to collect 50 blue crystals) and still giving the little guy a shot at something. And unlike luck garbs, the rewards from the Thanksgiving event are for the most part for deco purposes so they aren't a "must have" item with "epic" properties so no one really misses anything deemed "important" useful-in-combat items if they weren't able to participate much in the Thanksgiving event.

Whether the Thanksgiving event is time consuming depends on how one looks at it and what one's personal goals from this event are. Also, sometimes there is a chance to get a full map from one turkey instead of a fragment, thus limiting the time by that much more.

So the bottom line is, it's nice to see events that vary from time to time in terms of difficulty requirements (whether it's time and/or skill demanding)

 

[Prince Caspian]

I agree to all points. Particularly about the cooperative spirit.

One of the things I absolutely detest in these MMORPGs (but is a fact of life) is the outright selfishness and the ME FIRST ME FIRST ME FIRST attitude of so many players. Like in Halloween last year, some asswipe was camping in the cobweb lair *literally* for 50 hours straight and would go ballistic on anyone else who tried attacking "his" spiders. And the thing that pissed me off so bad about that -- this idiot was collecting them to sell them, and 99% of his "encroachers" were just trying to do the quest once, for themselves.

The "top attacker gets the prize" model is stupid, because the classes are so far from balanced. I can't compete with the damage dished out by a tamer's G Dragon, or even a Sampire. And there are plenty of melee players who can't even dish out the damage my pallyarcher can. When you say the top TWENTY attackers, that has moved it back far enough that anyone who was meaningfully involved gets a crack at it. That's how it should be.

I still think the Doom Gauntlet method is perfect: the more people you bring, the better your personal chances of getting an item, because there are more monsters to fight based on the attendence. So it literally is the more the better. It's the community spirit that leads to friendships being formed and positive gameplay, not the polar opposite climate of selfishness, xenophobia and greed that has pervaded these events for TOO gaddamn long in this game.