Its crazy how fast Blizzard can ruin their own stuff, so I thought I’d spell out a history of the Blood Moon over the past 5 days really quick.
First 24 hours of Phase 2: The Blood Moon Event is unintentionally amazing. Everyone quickly realizes they can just mosh pit in the graveyard, killing each other a ton and turning in whenever they’re capped on blood. No, this was neither win-trading nor exploiting. It was kill or be killed and I for one greatly enjoyed it.
However, it did allow people to collect upwards of 2000 coins per event, and to put that into perspective, an epic 2 hander weapon costs 1500 coins on the vendor. So yeah, that was a problem.
Next 24 hours of the event: Blizzard introduces the debuff ‘Drained of Blood’. This meant the graveyard mosh pitting ended. Whenever you rezzed, you were given a 1 minute debuff that meant no one could get currency from you for a minute.
This was lame imo. Everyone was hostile to everyone because it was an FFA event, but nobody dared fight anyone else who had the debuff so it became really scummy and just a lot less fun than the original version of the event. People with good groups could still farm 300-500 blood an event though, so not the end of the world.
Third 24 hour period of the event: The lag starts on 90% of SoD servers. As more people reached 40 and wanted to earn their epics from STV, more and more players funneled into the zone every 3 hours. The input lag started to become bad and those of us with half a brain started to see the writing on the wall.
Fourth 24 hour period of the event: The layering broke. Lag has gotten worse, like 5 seconds of input lag easily, but also you can no longer find your party members on the same layer as you. The population in every layer was just too high and even if you all started the event in the same layer, chances were that your five man would get layered away from one another over the course of the event. No more playing with friends or guildies.
And finally, today, the fifth day of the Phase and the fifth day of the Blood Moon Event’s existence: Blizzard has just made the debuff ‘Drained of Blood’ into a buff so that no one knows who’s worth event currency and who’s not anymore. With the debuff lasting an entire MINUTE, you can literally spend the entire event killing other players only to not earn a single blood.
At this point, so long as Drained of Blood is in the game and invisible to hostile players, the event isn’t just lame, or unplayable, it’s literally not worth even going to anymore.
This is bad, Blizzard. Really bad.
My solutions, if I were in Blizzard’s shoes, would be this:
- Remove Drained of Blood. Let people who want to mosh pit in graveyards do so.
- Make all items on the event vendor cost 10 times as much to make up for us making 2000 blood per event.
- Increase the number of possible layers in the dynamic layering system from 10 to 20 so that the population on the SoD servers can spread out more and actually enjoy the event.