Not really “dreading” it, its more of a “meh” feeling. The gem costs, energy system, guild reward/score tie-in for something that really doesn’t interact with the guild at all, and overall lack of rewards make dominant strategy trend toward a policy of non-interaction in what, with some changes in both execution and rewards, could have potentially been one of my favorite modes. The only change so far has been a single major orb of growth to slightly skew the Zuul’Goth chase into the realm of “maybe possible” for a few groups (although I still need to redo my math once there have been enough to get a clearer picture of the drop ratios on orbs, since my previous calculations of years still assumed equal drop rates and Ascension has, thus far on three accounts, been significantly rarer.)
What is mostly boils down to is the placement of orbs on the reward structure is that they are the ultimate prize of the game when their functions (yes, even Ascension) are all extremely underwhelming compared to the prospect of getting a troop you didn’t have before. The entire mode, its gem costs, the amount of hoops you have to jump through all seem to be predicated toward this - had this actually been the case, many people would be less vocal about extremely repetitive grinds, gem costs, and other problems plaguing the mode. Not that these aren’t also a huge problem that would cause burn-out long term no matter how good the rewards are (mostly the whole “guild obligation” angle that drives people to play it even if they don’t want to because they want to remain associated with their current guild, otherwise, it would lead into just less participation and engagement), I just think a lot less people would complain about it.
If, for example, raids were designed like this:
- Godslayer is something that is more readily available (and/or, not a thing at all but with more sensible scaling on the troops)
- The troop for the raid is an epic troop tuned to be used in the rest of the game
- Alternatively, this could have been another guild wars troop type situation where they are “common” rarity but handed out gradually and not made its way into normal chests
- event weapons that actually made sense, period
- All rewards besides sigils for existing raid tier purchases are simply spread out over the portal reward tiers in addition to what is there (p10/r12 - mythic copy of the troop right away, initial copy at a low reward tier)
- Raid shop teirs replaced by the ability to simply buy sigils in packs (slight discounts for bulk)
- Actual rewards for winning individual battles (eg., large amounts of glory and gold) that eclipse just brainlessly farming PvP
- orbs distributed in such a way that you are less completely at the mercy of the RNG - ie, “orb fragments” dropping that add up to the same amount of orbs, but smooth out the RNG, or just having fixed but rotating reward tables for specific orbs
It would have been infinitely more palletable, while being almost exactly the same rewards and gameplay wise. It still has the paid leaderboard and gem costs to push to the final reward tier, but because the thing you care about is actually somewhere on the reward table, it would encourage actually playing and pushing for that extra amount. Instead, the thing that you care about (loosely, since it is basically kingdom points filler beyond the week) you buy for 100 gems (+150 if you are still getting the weapons). The only fundamental difference here is that they sink those tiny bit of gems from even those that don’t want to participate in the event because they want to maintain full collection and then they play out of a sense of obligation rather than any kind of sense of reward, either intrinsic or extrinsic. And that tiny up front gem sink seems to be causing much more resentment than it is affecting any kind of economic correction. Why can’t the mode stand on its own merits and entice people that want to play more to dive in with additional gem purchases? What happened to “we sell fun”?
Of course, I’d still personally have preferred if either of these were much longer running events that didn’t tie my personal participation into my guild getting or not getting rewards along with tweaks to either the scaling or the restrictiveness or the pool (one or the other can foster creativity, both to the degree they are now limits it).
tl;dr:
- Reward structure needs to feel rewarding. Every time. Not only if you are “lucky”. Not only if you are “not unlucky”. Every. Time.
- Simple Battle Rewards for these events need to be worth the time spent compared to stuff you can do every day at any time (ie., PvP and/or explore). Consistently.
- Loosen team comp restrictions or tone down scaling a bit to allow people to be creative. Maybe both? (Reinforcements from x kingdom after y battles)
- the entire event should be tuned to be completed ~3-5 hours playtime per participant at an average speed, significantly less if you don’t by sigils (every other weekly reward in the game, combined, can generally be completed within this at endgame including guild wars, and this one thing sticks out like a sore thumb in terms of relative time commitment)
