I thought I’d be really happy with the world event. After all, it was a non-grinding non-dailies sort of affair that was fairly short. And I was enjoying the hell out of the quests.
But I’m not happy because I couldn’t finish.
It’s a 7-day event. And, a person might say, can you not get online once during that 7-day period? After all, it is not a long event. Well yes, I managed to get online on Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday… but, you see, that’s not good enough. Because the last 3 quests had a staggered release. So essentially I needed to get online at least once during a specific 4-day period to finish the last quest. I really thought I could make it, since I could probably squeeze in an hour or two Friday night or Saturday, right?
That didn’t happen. What did happen is that my washing machine gave up the ghost in a dramatic fashion a day before I was scheduled to leave on vacation. There was the repair guy to call out (on the weekend), there were soggy clothes to remove. Saturday afternoon, my last chance to finish, was spent at the fucking laundromat. And then, after all that, there was packing.
A week-long event is not acceptable to a casual player, even if the event doesn’t take that much in-game time to complete. What is even more unacceptable is the extremely crunched window to finish up that last quest to complete the event.
It’s not the rewards. Fuck the rewards. It’s that it’s new content! We haven’t had new content in a while, seriously. And I don’t get to complete all the new content that I am paying for because I missed a 4-day window.
For a game that is going F2P to appeal to a more casual audience, they are really alienating casual players right about now.
It’s frustrating isn’t it? Why not make it a two-week thing? I just don’t understand where their head is at sometimes. Scratch that, most of the time.
They should have picked up my laundry so I could spend the afternoon finishing their stupid event. That would have been totally fair.
I didn’t log in the entire week. I didn’t have time when the event started and near the end of the week, when I did have time, it seemed like I’d just have to be rushing around doing stuff on some-one else’s time schedule. I haven’t watched television on someone else’s schedule since I bought my first VCR. I’m not going to let EA or Bioware tell me how to spend my time either.
You didn’t even mention the extra maintenance windows that went into that week because of bugs/event changes.
I would have loved to try the new content, but I didn’t want to have to stay up powering through it all at once. A week is ALWAYS going to be too little. I would prefer things lasted closer to a month, even if they’re small.
I haven’t watched television on someone else’s schedule since I bought my first VCR. I’m not going to let EA or Bioware tell me how to spend my time either.
Seriously. WoW had the right idea when they switched from a daily dungeon to 7 per week. It allowed people to manage their own schedules rather than be forced to log in every night to do online “chores.”
Yeah, definitely waaay too frelling short. LotRo gives you at least a couple weeks, if not longer, because They understand what ‘casual player’ means, in addition to the fact that Many of us have More than one damned Toon to play.
Bio has been making some pretty stupid decisions lately, and I posit that F2P is one of them. I did not like the game environment in LotRo after they went F2P. It completely changed the social dynamic and the servers were flooded with ass-hat children everyday after middle school let out.
Sorry. Didn’t mean to piggyback your rant. But Yeah! Damn the man!
The F2p uncertainty is really doing a number on my guild. We have a lot of people, myself included, who believe that paying for microtransactions on TOP of a subscription fee is completely unacceptable. If that happens, I foresee a huge exodus and Bioware going “hurr durr, but F2P was supposed to help…”