A Very Limited Window
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.