Alright, after a day of the anniversary event, I can safely say that the participation is… more than a little lackluster. More like depressingly low, and I think the main issue is the amount of time & effort for the rewards; it’s just too much and takes too long to do.
Specifically, I’m looking at the remastered T2 set transmogs. The way the rewards are time-gated are killing participation, no one is bothering with them because it’s taking too long. An easy benchmark is that you realistically can’t get a full set in the first week - which means NO ONE is seeing the new sets out in the world. By the time people stop earning them, the broader playerbase will no longer care to pursue them; especially once they see how long the grind is.
It kind of looks like making it intentionally onerous early on while planning to nerf the grind later, but at this point players are aware of this strategy. Slow-walking the planned fix will be too little, too late.
As such, I would propose the following changes to the event:
- Drop the cost of the T2 Ensembles to 20 tokens (or whatever they’re called, bronze somethings). None of this 60 for the first, 40 for the second, 20 for the rest. Just straight up, 20 tokens for every one. If this is done during the first week, you won’t have to worry about refunding anyone who bought them early.
- Implement the extra tokens after getting 100 of them right away. I’m not even sure how that works, but the first 100 tokens being slower than the rest is NOT helping. Just allow players to skip that step.
- Allow alts to earn (extra) tokens as well. The event is effectively currency-capped for a single character on a weekly basis, not even the one-time quests you can do reward anything on alts. The items are purely cosmetic, there really isn’t a need to try and limit the player’s ability to obtain them. If players want to over-do it with grinding the rewards out, they’ll just run of rewards to get faster.
- Drop TWW as a requirement for Chromie’s Codex. Just had an unpleasant surprise of sitting the queue for it for over half hour, despite accepting the quest and EVERYTHING, only to find out I wouldn’t be allowed to zone in. Particularly annoyed that this also bars me from the mount from the meta-achievement… though it’s possible this is a bug. Either way, not happy.
Blizz needs to stop slow-walking rewards in their content in general, and the Anniversary Event - something that should be SILLY FUN - is the perfect example of this in action.
We should be DROWNING in remastered Tier 2 sets right now.
But no one can get them, and it’s turning the whole thing into a sour note.
You only get one chance to make a first impression, and it’s looking like a bad one.
… and that’s not even getting into the tuning issues, but there’s nothing to offset that right now. That needs to be done too, but that’ll take more time. Adjusting the cost of rewards shouldn’t.
For a point of comparison, do you want to know how long it takes to get the new glamour set from the currently ongoing FFXIV Halloween event?
10-15 minutes
And that’s if you actually watch the cutscenes and read all the dialogue. And it’s a full gear set that’s unique models. Needless to say, it just makes the implementation of the rewards for WoW’s big “20th Anniversary Event” look bad… especially when that’s the norm of how FFXIV’s rolls out the rewards for the vast majority of their seasonal events. Not always a full set of cosmetic gear, but the main reward is from a short questline anyone can do in a few minutes.
While I can see them wanting to include more for this event in WoW, they’ve already completely fumbled the reward structure. Players need to get RESULTS in the first week, period. Or even just the first hour of playing it.
It taking 2-3 weeks to get ANYTHING, and doing damn-near everything in the event to do so? That is killing the event’s participation.
