Ark's Ark

Dev : Right. For the next Event we’ve built a great new scenario. We’ve also made these nifty cloaks as a reward, and our players will have the opportunity to unlock the two new classes a week early. Pretty awesome, eh?

Boss Dev: Awesome indeed. Perhaps a little too awesome. Could you make it a bit more frustrating?

Dev: Umm, OK. Like how you made us add that massive influence grind to the Witching Night event?

Boss Dev: Exactly, but this time, design it so that many of our players can’t even take part! And for those that can, force them to play every single day for a week. So they have to choose between completing the event, and doing anything else with their lives! *Cackle*

GOA and Mythic know that there are many European servers that do not have scenarios any more. Makaisson, my server, has never had a tier 3 or tier 4 scenario, and I don’t imagine that it ever will.

Yet they designed the Heavy Metal event’s scenario, Reikland Factory, to need 18 people on each side. They also designed it so that you had to complete every daily task in order to gain the elite reward.

Predictably, on Makaisson, as well as many other servers, we cannot complete the daily tasks because we cannot get into the scenarios. (On Mak we can’t even get into the t1 version). Even on more populated servers, if you happen to play outside of prime-time, you have little chance of getting into the Reikland Factory.

On top of that, the Event is designed so that you have to play every single day, and complete every single task, in order to complete it. Punishing your players for taking a day off is not a healthy thing, and should not ever be considered as a mechanic for something like this.

The sensible and easy thing to do would have been to allow the Reikland Factory scenario to launch with fewer than 18 a side. That would also have been the solution to our never having had any t3 scenarios. For some reason, this option was discarded, causing a large proportion of WAR characters to not be able to participate in this much heralded live event.

Of course, last week GOA promised server transfers this week. This week there has been no information, and they chose to release Heavy Metal in Europe before enabling transfers. Leaving those of us on the dead servers (Frequently dead BECAUSE of the announcement that we were going to be transferred off) trapped, unable to take part in the event.

I shake my head. They take something that is good, a fun event, and through short-sightedness and apparent obliviousness to the state of their own game, they manage to turn it into something that brings annoyance rather than joy.

I have created a level 1 engineer on another server who is going to be trying to get the elite reward, as unlocking that will unlock the new classes on every server.

But I should not have to. And it does not help all my established characters, the ones I WANT to play, rather than the throwaway alt, get their cloaks.

On Makaisson, the global channels are filled with nothing but people being upset they can’t participate. THAT is what the Heavy Metal event means to those of us on underpopulated servers, while we wait for GOA to get around to letting us transfer. It is something that reduces, rather than increases, customer happiness.

US transfers started, what, a month ago? Europeans have still not been allowed to move. Equal service? Ha! It is like they are deliberately trying to make people not enjoy the game. I would actually like the opportunity to write a happy Warhammer post once in a while, instead of ones born of extreme irritation.

Mythic has good people making good things, but at some point in the process, someone is coming along and poisoning them with bad ideas. This person needs to be found, and put in charge of something less important than player enjoyment.