So finally ended up in a shard where the event worked as intended but the objectives/missions didn’t fill the personal participation bar. The elites gave zero credit on personal contribution, even if they were your objective. The ‘free people’ or ‘burn things’ gave 1% per thing you interacted with, which basically made it useless given the entire raid was on the same task and there were so few things to interact with.
This leaves us in a situation where the best thing to do in order to fill your participation bar is… not participate. At least not in the actual mission objectives. Zerging is, at present, pretty much the only way to get boxes.
Either the objectives need to give a ton of participation credit or the participation bar needs to be made a group thing, like every other world event, not an individual one. Preferably the second because it competition to tag everything feels awful and favors ranged heavily.