5-8 gaffers per boss would work really well. Should organize around 7:30 on Saturday.
We talking about Boss Blitz?
Yes. If we have those numbers, anyway, along with a handful of tags and a couple lines in all caps in map chat we should actually be able to crush it.
In the meantime, we're back to the same old crappy MMO situation where only a fraction of the players can enjoy the content the way it's meant to be played, except it's not based on skill/gear/builds, but sheer luck, a.k.a : are you in an instance with an organized guild to do the hard part for you.
My problem with this is that in comparison to the sort of "same old crappy MMO situation":
a) players
aren't excluded based on skill/gear/builds which is an absolutely crucial distinction from my perpsective
b) "sheer luck" implies players aren't rational agents with their own free will who can take action to improve and stand a better chance of success
Even outside of banding your guild together in an organized way like we will do, players who stick with the event and understand what needs to be done will gradually get better at doing it. If this process itself isn't worthwhile to you as a player, and you don't belong to a guild who is willing to do it together,
and you simply must do this for maximum reward as rapidly as possible, you could always simply
join TTS, which is not an exclusionary guild and will accept all comers regardless of skill baseline and has virtually no player cap in practice.
The sheer volume of ways in which this scenario differs from your typical "raid slot" assembly are so mindboggling to me that even making the comparison at face value is confusing.
The fact that
not just anyone can show up their first time and be guaranteed max rewards is an asset so far as I'm concerned, not a design flaw. It's true that you might get lucky and happen into success if people who are organized are running it and you're along for the ride, but that's just a
bonus if you get lucky. Luck isn't a prerequisite to get it done.
Now, rewards :
If you want to be accurate achieving Gold would be something like :
- 8 champ bags
- 1-3 master to exotic items
- 10 Gauntlet tickets or more
- around 20 tokens or more
- a chance at a Festival ticket (needed for sovereign weapons btw which makes them harder to get than last year too)
even knowing what the highest reward is I really don't get any urge to go and try to fight for it
But the 'reward' problem is also a problem of the game as a whole, that only gets highlighted more when content is designed to be harder.
We plainly look at content of this sort and the reward structure of the game very differently, and there's nothing wrong with that. That the game is able to offer something enough to make the experience of playing enjoyable for both of the player types we represent is an accomplishment in itself.
I have to default here to the approach I take to every single thing you can do in Guild Wars 2: only participate in stuff that would be enjoyable for you to do with even less tangible reward than offered, and preferably only stuff you'd still want to do even with
no tangible in-game reward for it.
The "reward problem" you refer to isn't a problem at all for someone of my playstyle; or more specifically, the "problem" in question is a byproduct of attempting to appeal to lots of different types of gamers simultaneously and being unable to please each one in every instance.
This time, for this event, zerging doesn't work. It makes people who try it have a poor experience. Their options are to abandon it because it requires too much effort, or do any of the things described above to improve their odds of success. I can't stress enough how much this idea is
independent from the rewards the event provides.
This is because the rewards don't change the content itself no matter how good they are.
On one end of the spectrum, if this gave by far the best rewards of anything in the game right now, we'd see more complaining centered on "unfair difficulty" because of the organization required.
In the middle, if it gave identical rewards but was much easier, we'd see more complaining about "ANet just releasing more mindless zerg content."
On the far end, it it gave worse rewards but were much easier, we'd see more complaining that it was "pointless even if you get gold every time."
Do you see what I'm getting at here? Striking the right balance is an absolute nightmare for designing anything like this, but it has to be about the content first and the reward second. Especially in a case like this where the rewards are non-unique- if you don't like the content, ignore the rewards.
I'm also not the one that makes it about rewards, the way the event itself is designed does it on it's own.
I couldn't disagree more. What you are referring to is the fact that you're given a Gold, Silver, or Bronze rating based on your performance, and that those ratings carry differing quantities of reward with them, Gold being the highest and requiring the most organization.
But let's think about different types of players. Imagine you're just viewing the event objectively, you know nothing about what the rewards are yet, just that getting Gold is tougher and requires more organization than Bronze. Now you ask yourself, "Do you care about getting Gold?"
If your answer is "it depends on what the rewards are" then I can 100% understand your frustration with this event. It's not designed primarily for that mindset.
My answer would be
"yes, goddamnit." I want to do whatever it takes to beat this content. I want to rally my guild around the idea of doing this and getting it down. I want to bring any randoms that happen to be around along for the ride, and teach them in the process. That's exciting to me. That interests me way more than any rewards. They could be twice what they are now or half what they are now, it would affect my desire to do this by exactly 0%.
Not that I'll mind the bags and tokens. I'm just sayin'.
